Visiting the Roman Forum in late spring several years ago remains one of the most important cultural moments I’ve ever experienced. Red poppies in full bloom scattered the area, life pulling through ruins. We are in a state of constant destruction and becoming, cycling and ever reinventing the past as present.
—Sterling Ruby
Gagosian is pleased to announce FUTURE PRESENT, an exhibition of new sculptures and collages by Sterling Ruby that reflect on the perils of environmental deterioration. While this is his first exhibition at the gallery in Rome, Ruby has exhibited in the city before at venues including MACRO–Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Roma and Fondazione Memmo (both in 2013).
In an oeuvre encompassing sculpture, ceramics, painting, drawing, collage, video, and textiles, Ruby engages art history, institutional power, and his autobiography. By contrasting clean lines and recognizable objects with rough-hewn and uncanny forms, he disrupts aesthetic convention and deconstructs contemporary social structures. Ruby’s sculptural practice draws on the craft traditions of sewing and woodworking as well as the domestic interiors and hot rod culture that he was exposed to while growing up on a farm in southeastern Pennsylvania. Living and working in Los Angeles, he pulls from the physical and conceptual landscapes of the city, exploring the capacity for acts of defacement, such as graffiti, to generate a new painterly sublime.
