STERLING RUBY | SP37

Private Collection, Europe (acquired directly from the artist)
Phillips, London, 15 October 2014, Lot 5
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is much lighter and brighter in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Extremely close inspection reveals some minute specks of wear to the extreme outer edges. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultra-violet light.
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Emanating with a mesmeric intensity, SP37 belongs to Sterling Ruby’s renowned Spray Paint series, first initiated in 2007. Signifying the bleak poetics of the urban landscape, the present work transforms vandalism and urban sprawl into a meditative celestial plane. Rich in tonality yet subdued in palette, dynamic ripples of charcoal swirl and symmetrically twist, accrued in wild striations. An ominous black veil consumes and encases the surfaces entirety, projecting an impending sense of violence and destruction. Framing the topography, two quasi-horizon lines reveal glimpses of fuchsia and orange, misty and effervescent, exuding an exquisite luminosity. The surface is at once depthless, abyssal and undoubtedly sublime. The result is an intoxicating visual sensation, a homogenous and coherent spatial order that is profoundly intense yet divinely delicate. Indeed, the present work thwarts and bursts beyond dimensional boundaries in which form and colour freely radiate in ambient space. SP37 propagates an unbridled energy. Blurred by the sweeping accretions of spray paint, interspersing strokes and drops imbue the work not only with a visual sfumato effect, but also a sense of quickness, of haste, an urgency to depict that retains the impulsiveness of graffiti art. Beyond the electrifying visual power of SP37’s dense colour field lie the multivalent chronicle of contemporary American society and the power struggles permeating the urban USA. Residing in Los Angeles, Ruby found himself surrounded by civic architecture and municipal structures whose surfaces were inscribed with an abundance of hegemonic scrawls; mark making describing gang disputes over territory. As the artist explains, “my work evolved from looking at graffiti, vandalism, the violence of tags in the streets and other forms of visual aggression, but as is more and more the case in my work, my painting has become more formal, more abstract... I think of it in terms of space, depth, punctuation or colour, as I imagine artists have been doing for centuries” (Sterling Ruby in conversation with Jérôme Sans, ‘Schizophrenic Monuments’, L’Officiel Art, March-May 2013, p. 102).

Demonstrating a preoccupation with gang tagging, street expressionism and urban demarcation, Ruby resignifies the formal language of abstract painting with the contemporaneity of urban street culture. Submerging the viewer in a hypnotic hallucinogenic panorama, Ruby’s dichotomy of repression and liberation therefore recalls the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat as well as the Abstract Expressionist and Colour Field giants of the twentieth century. With splatters akin to Jackson Pollock’s action paintings and hues that coalesce and bleed in a manner reminiscent of Mark Rothko and Morris Louis, Ruby builds a dazzling narrative steeped in the history of Modernism. A paradigm of Ruby’s idiosyncratic vernacular, SP37 stands as a testament to one of the most inventive bodies of work in contemporary painting.