STERLING RUBY

Life

Ruby was born in 1972 on an American Air Force base in Bitburg, Germany, to a Dutch mother and American father. He grew up in the United States, living in Baltimore, Maryland, and New Freedom and Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Lancaster, known for its Amish population, proved influential in informing a craft aesthetic in his practice.

Ruby attended The Pennsylvania School of Art & Design from 1992 to 1996. However, it was after graduating in 2002 at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago that he  began to develop his dense, layered practice and unique visual language. While working for the Video Data Bank at the institute, he came into contact with the writings of philosophers Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida and studied the early videos of artists Paul McCarthy and Bruce Nauman. Another influence is Mike Kelley, whom Ruby worked for as a teaching assistant after completing the Master of Fine Arts program at Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles, where he moved to in 2003.

Sterling Ruby Artworks

To categorise Sterling Ruby’s diverse, ever-evolving practice to a specific medium, style, or topic would be to misrepresent it. At its centre, his accumulative oeuvre to date has aimed to overwhelm and engage his audiences in a variety of means via objects, surfaces, and colour. Traversing one medium and technique to the next, Ruby is an artist interested in extremes, who thrives on the unpredictable.

Ruby represents a generation of Los Angeles-based artists, including Wade Guyton, Nate Lowman, and Jason Yates, who have set out to examine the legacy of Minimalism and its aftereffects via painting. Unpacking the legacies of predecessors such as Mark Rothko and Morris Louis, Ruby and his contemporaries have confronted the opposition between abstraction and formalism, asserting a refusal of these parameters. Painting however, is but one element in Ruby’s creative artillery.

Early, lesser-known presentations of his work at Foxy Production in New York signified the artist’s interest in spatial intervention. In 2007, his solo exhibition Superoverpass presented a commanding, singular, white, bridge-shaped sculpture that filled the main gallery space. Viewers were forced to negotiate around and under the installation, drawing attention to its unexpectedly defaced surface, which was scrawled with graffiti. In this way, Ruby assaulted the foundation and expectations surrounding Minimalist sculpture traditions. In 2009, his solo exhibition The Masturbators featured an eponymous video installation showing porn stars in provocative sexual acts to investigate the constructions of masculinity.

In addition to his investigation of materiality, Ruby’s practice demonstrates a desire for philosophical engagement. Aiming to analyse physical and mental boundaries and their abilities to divide, protect and isolate, Ruby’s output is characterised by an attention-grabbing, jarring reflection of reality. Through such polymorphous creativity and indistinction, a world of social stereotypes and visual tropes is enlivened, synthesising dual readings and meaning. Recurring references to national identity and power structures arise emerge in his familiar yet unfamiliar forms. 

Supermax

Perhaps Supermax, his solo exhibition at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in 2008, best exemplified Ruby's hybrid approaches for audiences. The exhibition title refers to the special units of American maximum security prisons where prisoners in solitary confinement are on lockdown for up to 23 hours a day. At once irresistible and grotesque, decorative and critical, his sculptural installation included enormous phallic polyurethane stalagmites exuding raw expressionistic force.

These luscious oozing towers, oscillating between frozen and morph-like states, evinced notions of transience and transference. Juxtaposed against abstract aerosol paintings, collages, soft sculptures in the form of blood or teardrops, and geometric sculptures made of brass, this collective ensemble of media enlivened physical and psychological confinement. Supermax was an important departure from the artist’s earlier engagement with Minimalist art and such interdisciplinary integration has since become the hallmark of his career.

Found Materials

Ruby's ongoing interest in repurposing found materials sustains his anarchistic desire to undermine power systems. In 2TRAPS, his solo exhibition at Pace Gallery, New York, in 2010, Ruby’s repurposed LA Police Department bus (once used to ferry inmates to and from Californian prisons) was outfitted with solitary confinement cages, speakers and exterior security doors.

For a 2016 exhibition at Gagosian in Le Bourget on the outskirts of Paris, Ruby deployed parts of deaccessioned American submarines, giving further weight to the association of such remnants. These reanimated, violently deconstructed fragments—think hulking engine parts, steel pipes and support structures—simultaneously resembled balanced modernist sculptures. Here, the high and low were successfully blended into a single installation.

Flags

Ruby’s recurring interest in the American flag and its constellation of stars also has potent connotations. Symbolising a ‘supernation’, the stars represent the depths of the unknown, of outer space, astrology, and ancient mythology. In 2014, Ruby explored a nationalistic thread throughout his work in his 'Flags' series, which consists of large-scale wall hangings resembling the American flag.

In 2012, Ruby presented his solo exhibition Soft Work at the Geneva Contemporary Art Center, which later travelled to FRAC Champagne-Ardenne in Reims, France; Bonniers Konsthall in Stockholm; and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome. The exhibition centred around soft sculptures made from colourful fabric. Various cushioned forms were sewn together and arranged akin to a children's playroom. However, upon closer inspection, recognisable patterns, including the American flag, menacing vampire-like fangs with blood droplets, and intestinal sausages, gave the textile forms a disconcerting, aggressive edge.

'BC' Series

Objects of comfort are also transformed in Ruby’s investigation into the traditions of quilt-making in his 'BC' (Bleach Collage) series. Repurposing fabric scraps and denim into patchwork collages, these works recall the work of Robert Rauschenberg and Mike Kelley as well as Ruby’s interest in craft art and sewing, which are often overlooked in modern and contemporary art historical discourses.

Studio

Today, Ruby works from a vast studio compound in Los Angeles, creating commissioned projects of mammoth proportions for international museums and gallery exhibitions with his studio team.

In addition to his evolving artistic practice, Ruby has also ventured into fashion, launching his clothing brand S.R. Studio. LA. CA in 2019 and collaborating with the American apparel Vans in 2024. 

Sterling Ruby Exhibitions

Sterling Ruby has held solo exhibitions at the Belvedere Museum, Vienna; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Museum of Art and Design, New York; Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Texas. Ruby’s work has been included in group exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Rubell Museum, Miami; Tuscon Museum of Art, Tuscon, Arizona; the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan.

Rachael Vance | Ocula | 2024