STERLING RUBY

Atropa, featuring all new works by Ruby, is named for the nightshade genus (commonly known as deadly nightshade) that references Atropos – the Greek Fate who cuts the thread of life to bring death. The exhibition engages with the paradox the plant embodies: lethally toxic yet medicinally valuable, a convergence of destruction and restoration.

New graphite drawings represent the culmination of a series Ruby began thirty years ago, characterized by their palimpsestic quality. Executed with raw energy and painstaking labor, these works prioritize instinctive gesture and automatic drawing over conventional representation. Arising from dense layers of frenetic lines, erasing and smudging, rhythmic textures coalesce into botanical forms, offering fragile glimpses of nature within their turbulent surfaces.

“Flowers have become these memorials — icons of things changing and ceasing.” –Sterling Ruby

Building upon Ruby’s obsessive mark-making, the pen-and-ink drawings deploy delicate, rapid lines that burst into dark, compulsive voids, from which petal and leaf shapes materialize. Rendered with relentless intensity, each motif collapses the boundary between what is seen and what is imagined—figuration emerging as a byproduct of the drawing process itself.