Gagosian is pleased to announce TILL DEATH DO US PART, an exhibition of new works by Sterling Ruby opening at the rue de Castiglione gallery in Paris on June 12. This suite of collages and cast bronze sculptures continues Ruby’s use of flowers as both raw and iconographic material. Derived from his expanding studio garden in Vernon, California, and extended time spent in the Eastern Sierras, the installation envelops visitors in an elegy to the floral.
Visible through the gallery’s storefront windows, prints of the GHOSTS series (2026) are architecturally scaled and papered across the gallery walls, filling them with deep blue linear marks distinguished by a dense texture reminiscent of pastures undulating on a windy day. The works’ source collages, which combine traditional cyanotypes with washy drawn elements, hang on the walls over the field of blues. Occupying the space itself are several unique cast bronze sculptures from the series Bound Flowers. Couple. (2025–), which represent pairs of flowers bound in an embrace. This coupling provides a framework for the entire exhibition, each element functioning in relation to another, then another. These relationships are presented as a tandem dance, with forms mimicking, overlapping, intertwining, and even appearing to look at one another.
The most evocative examples of this tête-à-tête are the subtly emotive gestures of the bound flowers, which imply a more complex relationship: marriage. Flowers have been positioned in distinctive stances mimicking those of wedding portraits in which two bodies are posed together in a rigid commitment—“till death do us part.” Relationships remain central as Ruby refers to seventeenth-century Flemish and Dutch still-life painting, in which domestic arrangements carry a wide range of symbolism. Akin to these intricate historical works, the details of Ruby’s floral representations—the sculptures in particular—convey painstaking labor to which the unified naturalness of the specimens stands in contrast. Flowers are portrayed in various stages of decay, returning to their symbolism for the impermanence of life.
