Possessed of a profound material sensibility, Sterling Ruby’s art speaks in a language inspired by sub-cultural phenomena ranging from graffiti, urban gangs, and prison systems, to craft and the history of quilt-making. Ruby’s work, which encompasses nearly every medium, voraciously cycles through the autobiographical, the art historical, and the sociological, creating layers of reciprocal influence that radiate outward. Ruby exploits tensions within aesthetic and societal systems, recreating and drawing our attention to repressive and liberated states.
Hauser & Wirth New York is pleased to present ‘Sterling Ruby. SUNRISE SUNSET’, an exhibition of new works by the Los Angeles based artist. Comprised of paintings, cardboard collages, fabric collages, tapestries, ceramics, a mobile, and sculptures in metal, urethane and fabric, the exhibition will be on view.
Sterling Ruby’s studio has been described as ‘an archive, a vessel’ filled with a plethora of art objects and materials, including failures, successes, and pieces that offer the potential to be reclaimed and reanimated as new forms. The works on view in ‘SUNRISE SUNSET’ represent the many modes of the artist’s production but play upon a central motif: a tension between the horizon lines of the artist’s monumental paintings, and the circular forms in primary colours that are found in a mobile, the collages, and sculptures. These circles suggest celestial bodies – the rising sun, an orbiting moon. Ruby presents a personal cosmology; his work traces an existential timeline, the continual cycle of day into night, a day’s production or a lifetime’s, from birth to death. Here we find powerful forces in opposition, calibration, and suspension: literal and figurative, representational and abstract, East Coast and West Coast, the permanent and the fleeting, pathos and playfulness, glory and abjection.
*image (left)
courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth