About
Sterling Ruby’s work engages with issues related to autobiography, art history, and the violence and pressures within society. Employing diverse aesthetic strategies and mediums—including sculpture, drawing, collage, ceramics, painting, and video—he examines the tensions between fluidity and stasis, Expressionism and Minimalism, the abject and the pristine.
Born on Bitburg Air Base, Germany, to an American father and a Dutch mother, Ruby moved at a young age to the United States, where he grew up on a farm in southeastern Pennsylvania. There he encountered Amish quilt-making and Pennsylvania redware pottery, both of which directly inspired his initial forays into garment-making, soft sculpture, and ceramics. Ruby graduated from the Pennsylvania College of Art and Design, Lancaster, in 1996. He received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2002, followed by an MFA from the ArtCenter College of Design, Pasadena, California, in 2005.
Living and working in Los Angeles, Ruby draws endless inspiration from the city’s physical and conceptual landscape. A subseries of the SP paintings (2007–14), the VIVIDS (2014), are electric color fields inspired by the shifting, multihued skies that he encounters on his way to the studio, while the SUBMARINE (2015) and TABLES (2015 –19) series were created from hulking industrial parts sourced nearby. Ruby’s work often deals with the ways in which acts of defacement, like urban demarcation and graffiti, can produce a painterly sublime. Both in his YARD paintings (2015–16) and in his WIDW paintings (2016–), he taps into the speed and motion of collage, incorporating bleached fabric and cardboard scraps and combining abstract color fields with fragments of studio refuse. Continually pushing the boundaries between artistic mediums, Ruby launched a ready-to-wear clothing line in 2019.
Photo: Bennet Perez
#SterlingRuby
Exhibitions
Sterling Ruby: The Frenetic Beat
Ester Coen meditates on the dynamism of Sterling Ruby’s recent projects, tracing parallels between these works and the histories of Futurism, Constructivism, and the avant-garde.
Sterling Ruby: TURBINES
Join Sterling Ruby in his Los Angeles studio as he works on new abstract paintings ahead of his exhibition TURBINES at Gagosian in New York.
Augurs of Spring
As spring approaches in the Northern Hemisphere, Sydney Stutterheim reflects on the iconography and symbolism of the season in art both past and present.
Sterling Ruby: Disjointed Monuments to Nothing
Alessandro Rabottini investigates the theoretical and formal underpinnings of Sterling Ruby’s career through the lens of the artist’s series ACTS.
Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Fall 2019
The Fall 2019 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring a detail from Sinking (2019) by Nathaniel Mary Quinn on its cover.
For Notre-Dame
An exhibition at Gagosian, Paris, is raising funds to aid in the reconstruction of the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris following the devastating fire of April 2019. Gagosian directors Serena Cattaneo Adorno and Jean-Olivier Després spoke to Jennifer Knox White about the generous response of artists and others, and what the restoration of this iconic structure means across the world.
Sterling Ruby: Bloody Pots
Ceramics expert Garth Clark explores Sterling Ruby’s practice in the medium, addressing the work’s allegiances and divergences from tradition.
Gagosian Quarterly Winter 2018
The Winter 2018 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available. Our cover this issue comes from High Times, a new body of work by Richard Prince.
Sterling Ruby: Winterpalais, Vienna
Mario Codognato, curator of the exhibition, discusses Sterling Ruby’s first-ever European survey, at the Belvedere’s Winterpalais galleries.
Fairs, Events & Announcements
Public Installation
Sterling Ruby
SPECTERS TOKYO
November 23–December 23, 2023
Sogetsu Kaikan, Tokyo
www.sogetsu.or.jp
In SPECTERS TOKYO, Sterling Ruby’s first public installation in Japan, the artist creates a dialogue with Isamu Noguchi’s indoor stone garden Heaven (1977–78), which is permanently installed in the lobby of the Sogetsu Foundation headquarters. Exploring the interactions between the living and the dead, Ruby’s site-specific work draws influence from kaidan, a genre of Japanese ghost stories. The otherworldly scene includes spectral figures made from heavily worn, tattered textiles and found objects that are suspended from the ceiling like puppets.
Installation view, Sterling Ruby: SPECTERS TOKYO, Sogetsu Kaikan, Tokyo, November 23–December 23, 2023. Artwork © Sterling Ruby. Photo: Kenji Takahashi, courtesy Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo
Art Fair
Taipei Dangdai 2023
May 12–14, 2023, booth E10
Taipei Nangang Exhibition Center
taipeidangdai.com
Gagosian is pleased to participate in Taipei Dangdai 2023, presenting works by Louise Bonnet, Dan Colen, Edmund de Waal, Urs Fischer, Cy Gavin, Nan Goldin, Katharina Grosse, Mark Grotjahn, Damien Hirst, Thomas Houseago, Yayoi Kusama, Deana Lawson, Takashi Murakami, Sterling Ruby, Alexandria Smith, Spencer Sweeney, Kon Trubkovich, Mary Weatherford, Cameron Welch, Anna Weyant, and Zeng Fanzhi.
Gagosian’s booth at Taipei Dangdai 2023. Artwork, left to right: © Mark Grotjahn; © Zeng Fanzhi; © 2023 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All rights reserved. Photo: Ringo Cheung
Art Fair
Art Basel Miami Beach 2022
December 1–3, 2022, booth D5
Miami Beach Convention Center
artbasel.com
Gagosian is pleased to present a selection of modern and contemporary works at Art Basel Miami Beach 2022. Returning to Miami for the fair’s twentieth anniversary, the gallery is honored to have participated each year the fair has been held.
Gagosian’s booth at Art Basel Miami Beach 2022. Artwork, left to right: © Gerhard Richter; © Amoako Boafo; © Richard Prince; © 2022 Judd Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; © Richard Diebenkorn Foundation; © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; © Stanley Whitney. Photo: Sebastiano Pellion di Persano
Museum Exhibitions
On View
For What It’s Worth
Value Systems in Art since 1960
Through June 29, 2024
The Warehouse, Dallas
thewarehousedallas.org
Looking at global, conceptual art tendencies since 1960, For What It’s Worth focuses on artists who generate, question, and infect value systems through their work. These systems might address exchange, social structures, or philosophical intangibles, and many of the selected works share an exploration of the codification of values through language and patterns of behavior. Work by Chris Burden and Sterling Ruby is included.
Chris Burden, Kunst Kick (3 photographs and text), 1974 (detail), The Warehouse, Dallas © 2024 Chris Burden/Licensed by the Chris Burden Estate and Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: courtesy Chris Burden Estate
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Sterling Ruby in
Un patrimoine méconnu. Tableaux du diocèse de Paris du XVe au XXe siècle
October 18–December 16, 2023
Collège des Bernardins, Paris
www.collegedesbernardins.fr
This exhibition, whose title translates to A Little-Known Heritage: Paintings from the Diocese of Paris from the Fifteenth to the Twentieth Centuries, places fourteen rarely seen paintings from the collection of the diocese in dialogue with a work by Sterling Ruby. Ruby’s ceramic sculpture Basin Theology/BRAVAMAX (2014) alludes to the rich Christian symbolism of the basin as a purifying vessel. Made by fusing discarded clay shards into a new form, the work engages the paintings’ sacred themes.
Installation view, Un patrimoine méconnu. Tableaux du diocèse de Paris du XVe au XXe siècle, Collège des Bernardins, Paris, October 18–December 16, 2023. Artwork © Sterling Ruby. Photo: Thomas Lannes
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Room by Room
Concepts, Themes, and Artists in the Rachofsky Collection
September 9–November 25, 2023
The Warehouse, Dallas
thewarehousedallas.org
Room by Room builds on the ongoing interest at The Warehouse to reflect on the development of its collection, presenting works for the first time. Spanning a range of mediums, geographies, and eras, each gallery focuses on a single artist or theme, allowing an in-depth look at the artistic movements important to the collection from the outset, together with other avenues of interest that have developed over the years. Work by Richard Artschwager, Carol Bove, Alex Israel, Sterling Ruby, and Jonas Wood is included.
Jonas Wood, Patterned Interior with Mar Vista View, 2020, Rachofsky Collection, installation view, The Warehouse, Dallas © Jonas Wood. Photo: Kevin Todora
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Sterling Ruby in
ARTZUID 2023
May 20–September 24, 2023
Various locations in Amsterdam
artzuid.nl
The eighth edition of ARTZUID, the Amsterdam Sculpture Biennial, includes more than fifty outdoor sculptures by fifty international artists along a two-and-a-half-kilometer route in the borough of Amsterdam-Zuid. This year’s edition is organized around the theme of “transfer,” reflecting how artists and iconic movements of the 1960s, 1980s, and 2000s sought to transfer the site of artistic engagement from the institution to the streets. Work by Sterling Ruby is included.
Sterling Ruby, BLACK STOVE I, 2014 © Sterling Ruby