Online Reading
Sterling Ruby
ACTS + TABLES
Sterling Ruby: ACTS + TABLES is available for online reading from August 23 through September 21 as part of the From the Library series. Comprising two books housed in a slipcase, ACTS + TABLES was produced on the occasion of the Ruby’s 2019 exhibition at Gagosian, Britannia Street, London. One volume is dedicated to the ACTS series and the other to the TABLES series. In ACTS—whose title is short for “Absolute Contempt for Total Serenity”—Ruby captures liquid dye inside clear urethane and balances these pure prisms atop scuffed, inscribed, and spray-painted laminate-clad bases. The exhibition also includes TABLE (DOUBLE LAST SUPPER) (2019), the culminating work of Ruby’s TABLES, a series that explores the concept of personal and cultural archaeology. The book features a two-part essay by curator and critic Jenelle Porter and is designed by Purtill Family Business.
#FromTheLibrary
Sterling Ruby: ACTS + TABLES (London: Gagosian, 2019)
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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
In Conversation
Sterling Ruby
Tim Blanks
Tuesday, March 2, 2021, 12pm est
Sterling Ruby will speak with Tim Blanks, editor of the Business of Fashion, about his artistic process and foray into haute couture, as well as how he has stayed creative during the pandemic. The haute couture collection was created in Ruby’s Los Angeles studio, expanding the idea of the artist’s studio as atelier. Garment construction—from pattern-drafting and 3-D draping to dyeing, washing, and rinsing—occurs under the same roof as metalworking, oil painting, and ceramic firing. To join the online event, register at businessoffashion.zoom.us.
Photo: Melanie Schiff
Artist Talk
Sterling Ruby
(At Home) On Art and the American Psyche
Wednesday, December 2, 2020, 7–8pm est
Sterling Ruby will speak with former Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden chief curator Stéphane Aquin about his multifaceted art practice and his monumental sculpture DOUBLE CANDLE (2018), recently acquired by the museum and installed in their Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC. In addition to demonstrating Ruby’s belief in an embedded unification of both formal and political concerns, DOUBLE CANDLE brings together his interest in textiles and “soft sculpture”—the 23-foot-tall bronze sculpture is based on a “soft” version of the work that was recently on view in an exhibition surveying Ruby’s work at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Miami and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. This virtual event is part of Talking to Our Time, the Hirshhorn’s online series of free talks featuring a diverse group of artists and collectives. To join, register at smithsonian.zoom.us.
Sterling Ruby. Photo: Melanie Schiff
Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Summer 2024
The Summer 2024 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring a detail of Roy Lichtenstein’s Bauhaus Stairway Mural (1989) on the cover.
Maurizio Cattelan: Sunday Painter
Curated by Francesco Bonami, Sunday is the first solo presentation of new work by Maurizio Cattelan in New York in over twenty years. Here, Bonami asks us to consider Cattelan as a political artist, detailing the potent and clear observations at the core of these works.
Frank Stella
In celebration of the life and work of Frank Stella, the Quarterly shares the artist’s last interview from our Summer 2024 issue. Stella spoke with art historian Megan Kincaid about friendship, formalism, and physicality.
Highlights: Salone del Mobile Milano 2024
This year’s Salone del Mobile Milano brought together a range of installations, debuts, and collaborations from across the worlds of design, fashion, and architecture. We present a selection of these projects.
Stanley Whitney: Vibrations of the Day
Stanley Whitney invited professor and musician-biographer John Szwed to his studio on Long Island, New York, as he prepared for an upcoming survey at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum to discuss the resonances between painting and jazz.
Richard Armstrong
Richard Armstrong, director emeritus of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, joins the Quarterly’s Alison McDonald to discuss his election to the board of the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, as well as the changing priorities and strategies facing museums, foundations, and curators. He reflects on his various roles within museums and recounts his first meeting with Frankenthaler.
Touch of Evil
Andrew Russeth situates Jamian Juliano-Villani’s daring paintings within her myriad activities shaking up the art world.
Jim Shaw: A–Z
Charlie Fox takes a whirlwind trip through the Jim Shaw universe, traveling along the letters of the alphabet.
Oscar Murillo: Marks and Whispers
Ahead of two exhibitions—The Flooded Garden at Tate Modern, London, and Marks and Whispers at Gagosian, Rome—curator Alessandro Rabottini visited Oscar Murillo’s London studio to discuss the connections between them.
Vladimir Kagan’s First Collection: An Interview with Chris Eitel
Chris Eitel, Vladimir Kagan’s protégé and the current director of design and production at Vladimir Kagan Design Group, invited the Quarterly’s Wyatt Allgeier to the brand’s studio in New Jersey, where the two discussed the forthcoming release of the First Collection. The series, now available through holly hunt, reintroduces the first chair and table that Kagan ever designed—part of Eitel’s efforts to honor the furniture avant-gardist’s legacy while carrying the company into the future.
Lauren Halsey: Full and Complete Freedom
Essence Harden, curator at Los Angeles’s California African American Museum and cocurator of next year’s Made in LA exhibition at the Hammer Museum, visited Lauren Halsey in her LA studio as the artist prepared for an exhibition in Paris and the premiere of her installation at the 60th Biennale di Venezia this summer.
Candy Darling
Published in March, Cynthia Carr’s latest biography recounts the life and work of the Warhol superstar and transgender trailblazer Candy Darling. Combining scholarship, compassion, and a rich understanding of the world Darling inhabited, Carr’s follow-up to her biography of the artist David Wojnarowicz elucidates the incredible struggles that Darling faced in the course of her determined journey toward a more glamorous, more honest, and more tender world. Here, Carr tells Josh Zajdman about the origins of the book, her process, and what she hopes readers glean from the story.