Born in 1972, Sterling Ruby is an artist who uses a wide range of aesthetic strategies in his practice, from saturated, glossy, poured polyurethane sculptures, to drawings, collages, richly glazed ceramics, graffiti inspired spray paint paintings, and video. His work is a balancing act, maintaining a constant tension between a multitude of elements. It deals with issues related to the violence and pressures within society, and art history, even as it also reflects his personal history. In all of his work, he vacillates between the fluid and static, the minimalist and expressionistic, the pristine and the defaced.
Caudex (2017) is one of Ruby’s new ceramics works, which mark a departure from the vessel to the totemic, the figurative. These “totems” evoke both soldiers in formation and primitive monoliths. Their extended sculptural forms allude to the elongated figures of Giacometti, as well as the elegant sculptural works of Cy Twombly. In these sculptures, Ruby suggests new organic forms, some with shell-like helmets and protruding limbs, connecting behavior to biology, anatomy to artifact.
Ruby has presented solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2008), FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Reims, France and Centre D’Art Contemporain, Geneva (2012) travelling to Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rome, Italy (2013) and most recently, at Winterpalais, Belvedere Museum. Vienna (2016). His works are included in the public collections such as Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Tate Modern, London; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Moderna Museet, Stockholm among others.
