Sterling Ruby addresses notions of violence, repression, and social control through a diverse artistic practice, incorporating sculpture, video, photography, drawing, collage and installation. Through visceral, cryptic and architectonic motifs, ranging from "Supermax" prisons to biomorphic forms, Ruby trades medium-specificity for an exploration of shifting borders of social and subjective experience that propose a self-styled “amorphous law.” Sterling Ruby: CHRON presents a survey of the Los Angeles-based artist’s work in drawing with approximately fifty works spanning from 2003 to the present, including several new large-scale works conceived for the Drawing Room. The exhibit foregrounds the role of drawing as medium, gesture and act, in Ruby’s multivalent body of work—from graffiti-based spray paint drawings to photographic collages, nail polish abstractions, and inscribed Formica sculptures—which when viewed together reveal formal and thematic connections informed by the artist’s background in drawing.
Curated by João Ribas