He is back once again. But it is not like he has been gone for long. Known for dipping into the worlds of sculpture, videography, and fashion with the likes of Raf Simmons, Sterling Ruby is bringing his art to GAGOSIAN New York, and it is new. It will be the eighth time his name appears in an exhibition this year. He does not stop. Born in 1972 and studying at art school by 20, ‘Sterling Ruby’ is a name that began appearing and reappearing on exhibition press releases while most artists his age were using training wheels. Today, countless exhibitions in which he has been featured swarm websites as students flail around, struggling to narrow down his oeuvre to a few hundred words. Tough
TURBINES is the new exhibition on the block (opened on November 10 at New York’s Gagosian West 21st Street gallery). His latest series (which commenced in 2021) of abstract paintings are unsettling and explosive, with all the symptoms of a tumult. A storm has passed this time, and frayed paint streaks have dried. The aftermath is visible, but the finality of the wreckage is not: the postdiluvian world of Ruby’s imagination is sharp and jagged. It is a pair of distressed pants with raw hems, patched by plastered cardboard and thick strips of color ripping across a once-flat, paint-stained background. His vibrant backdrops sit tacitly behind deep diagonal bands, the hairs of pigment outstretched with anger to vex. The texture is Ruby’s mother tongue, and his vernacular is surface. It is defined yet unpredictable, hanging silently on a wall yet tumescent with rage.
His recent TURBINES are just that. Unsurprisingly, Ruby has turned in another direction, implying social and political unrest, war, and squalor without manic over-explanation. They are not distillations of forms or shifting conditions between destruction and creation. They are more coherent than that, lacking the overt pretensions of a giant balloon animal or a banana duct-taped to a wall. They are fragments of an imagination pressed onto canvas, by intersecting mediums and energetic forms. Cardboard components will be said to look like debris flown in by a wind of social distress and political turmoil.
Yeah, sure. Or, they add to the texture just as Braque added newspaper over a century ago and Bacon added sand forty years ago. Ruby’s artworks always generate a whirlwind of assumptions, speculations, and social commentaries from stressed mouths that conceptualize everything from a crease in a canvas to a placement of a smear. (The smear turns out to be from his knee while kneeling over the canvas). Meanwhile, laypeople will enter galleries looking at these brilliant powdery slashes and think, “this looks like a kitchen bench with a spice jar that’s fallen over”.
If looking for context, look to Ruby. The afterimage of Ruby’s artistic process is both socially and personally charged. Vertical black, blue and red bands are pushed to their sides like fallen smokestacks, reminding me of the album, Animals by Pink Floyd — or broken branches. The window of his 2016 WIDW series is blown away this year, and the TURBINE takes its place. It fidgets uncomfortably on its chair, explosive like an angered father or an IED.
For this show, he wished to reflect the charged nature of the present in an articulated yet inexplicit manner. He references the Futurists and Russian Constructivists, with angles to El Lissitzky’s image of the prelapsarian revolution. Their friction is washed through his canvases. Footprints, splotches and a multi-hued palette create a sense of motion, cut with cardboard shards (calling to his first use of them in 2011) into a tense breath of complete unease. This is what Ruby wants.
For this show, he wished to reflect the charged nature of the present in an articulated yet inexplicit manner. He references the Futurists and Russian Constructivists, with angles to El Lissitzky’s image of the prelapsarian revolution. Their friction is washed through his canvases. Footprints, splotches and a multi-hued palette create a sense of motion, cut with cardboard shards (calling to his first use of them in 2011) into a tense breath of complete unease. This is what Ruby wants.
Of course, Ruby went further than vertical lines to achieve his goal and was far more colorful than Piero Manzoni’s lines which divided frames just as much. Paintings such as TURBINE. DUTCH WIP., 2022 oscillates between colors like a broken ladder or a shattered Rothko. His placement of marks is all but an afterthought. Forms in TURBINE. SHAKING HAND WITH BOMBS (RIGHT), 2022 has a solid direction, making one think of smoke pluming from the funnels of the soon-to-down Titanic. Even the diagonals extend to the chaotic consistency of Pollock. Aside from their over-the-floor painting style, Ruby opposes social structures by displaying their eventual demise. He pits materials and forms against each other like Janet Sobel’s tipped canvas and drip paint and Pollock’s later exclusive use of such in the horizontal.
The show will stimulate a large presence and considerable chatter from crowds spanning the arts, fashion, and public spheres. Ruby’s practice may be a hemorrhage to define or hernia-inducing to count on fingers, but it is refined in its intention and production. A collage of creativity enters the canvas, and ensuingly dries and sticks to our minds. The vibrant backgrounds are as reflective and bright as caution signs, and even the loud yellow is repressed by confronting dark streaks. The present is now, and that makes us shiver.
Words by BILLY DE LUCA
Sterling Ruby
TURBINES
November 10–December 23, 2022
Gagosian, West 21st Street, New York
Art Credits:
All photographs by Rob McKeever
1,4,6, 8 & 9 installation view. Artworks © Sterling Ruby. Courtesy Gagosian.
2) TURBINE. CICADA KILLER., 2022. Acrylic, oil, and cardboard on canvas. © Sterling Ruby. Courtesy Gagosian.
3) TURBINE. DUTCH WIP., 2022. Acrylic, oil, and cardboard on canvas. © Sterling Ruby. Courtesy Gagosian.
7) TURBINE. SHAKING HAND WITH BOMBS (RIGHT)., 2022.
Acrylic, oil, and cardboard on canvas. © Sterling Ruby. Courtesy Gagosian.