Sterling Ruby
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Sterling Ruby’s work resists categorization, shifting between abjection and refinement, chaos and control, as if testing the limits of artistic and cultural boundaries. Moving fluidly across sculpture, spray painting, ceramics, textiles, collage, and readymades, his practice thrives on contradiction—disrupting tradition while simultaneously engaging with its weight. This restless evolution is not just aesthetic but conceptual, channeling the instability of the American prison system, violence, mental health, and identity into a visual language he calls “schizophrenic,” where meaning is fractured, reassembled, and perpetually unsettled.
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Exhibitions
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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.Gagosian
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Works