Sterling Ruby

Metro Pictures, New York
Private Collection, Switzerland
Sotheby's, London, October 16, 2009, lot 129
Acquired by the present owner from the above sale

Los Angeles, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Sterling Ruby: SUPERMAX 2008, June - September 2008, pp. 108-109, illustrated in color

Exh. Cat., Bergamo, Galleria d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Sterling Ruby: GRID RIPPER, 2008, pp. 2-3, illustrated in color

This work is in very good condition overall. There is evidence of light wear and handling to the sides and corners of the canvas, most noticeably in the bottom two corners and the upper left corner, where minor rubbing to the original surface is apparent when viewed closely. This work has not been viewed under ultraviolet light inspection. Unframed.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

Sterling Ruby's SP 30 is a grand-sized abstract work made with spray paint and acrylic applied to stretched canvas. Its surface is washed in fluorescent colors—colors that may be foreign to a painter's palette but more readily seen in the spray paint aisle. Its lemon-lime greens, bright pinks, tangerines, and teals are cut through by amorphous intrusions of black. Both SP 30's material and monumental size gestures toward the urban space of an empty wall, one once blank but now occupied and covered by illicit graffiti. The spray paint leaves both a hazy, washed-out look and a stippled effect on the surface of the huge canvas. Within the frame of the work, there is a vague horizon line visible through the black, found where the warm tones of the painting's top edge fade down into greens and blues. But beyond that subtle horizon line, invoking a sense of landscape, or in the very least of some symbolic space, SP 30 remains obtuse, an exercise in layered color, material manipulation, and an ode, perhaps, to spray-painted tags, murals, and symbols that cover much of the Los Angeles landscape.
Sterling Ruby is a Los Angeles based artist who works in a wide variety of media; indeed, the vast diversity of his output has become one of his signatures. From heavy, ceramic vessels and bulging soft sculptures, to collage-based paintings and aerosol based works, Ruby's aesthetic is difficult to pin down. It is both expansive and seemingly ever-expanding. As Gea Politi noted in a 2014 article for Flash Art, "[Ruby's] work is as complex as the American empire. It addresses numerous topics, including aberrant psychologies (particularly schizophrenia and paranoia), urban gangs and graffiti, hip-hop culture, craft, punk, masculinity, violence, public art, prisons, globalization, American domination and decline, waste and consumption." Working through this many topics in as many media, it is perhaps no surprise that Ruby has garnered significant attention for his broad-based and prolific practice since graduating with his MFA from Pasadena's Art Center College of Design in 2005. Embracing a wide variety of what Paul Schimmel calls "disgraced materials"—materials associated with "women's work," craft, street art or vandalism, for instance—Ruby somehow rehabilitates both the materials and himself.

Ruby's SP 30 privileges color, gesture, and action in a way that is reminiscent of the work of American Abstract Expressionists. Chief among them is Jackson Pollock, whose rich fields of overlapping spatters of paint are as iconic as are the photographs capturing his bodily process of painting—images by Hans Namuth and others that picture the artist dancing around the edges of his works, casting paint across their broad expanses the way one might cast a fishing line. It seems that there are analogies to be made in both the visuality and the physicality of Jackson's and Ruby's works. Both men work largely, creating dense and abstract fields. The taxing physical nature of these projects is also mirrored in the work of urban graffiti writers who provide Ruby with further inspiration. Graffiti writers use their bodies similarly, often working at challenging scales, and of course, under the cloak of illegality. Another art world comparison can be made between Ruby's spray paintings and Gerhard Richter's inspired Cage series. Richter's paintings are made through the application and subsequent removal of thick layers of oil paint that the artist applies and then scrapes away, continuing this additive and subtractive process until he is finished. As curator Robert Storr has said of Richter, "rather like really good engine, [he] burns clean; there is no residue." The same can be said of Ruby, who seems to use everything at his disposal to feed into his art works, giving himself over to them completely.

Began as a series in 2007, Ruby's spray paintings are meant to refer back to the practice of tagging territory. Graffiti writers use a variety of materials, but chiefly, spray paint, to inscribe their name, symbol, or sign on the surfaces of their streets. Still heavily associated with gang activities in urban cities like Los Angeles, graffiti serves an underground function—to claim and identify space, demarcating lines of ownership and belonging. In Ruby's hands, the tagger's aerosol can seems to get the best of him: instead of producing images that define space and self, Ruby's spray paint descends into a murky field, where nothing is communicated, nothing is clear. These spray painted works, then, become something of a statement of the artist's post-modern position, an affirmation of a certain lack of certainty. Though monumentally sized and visually bold, SP 30 maintains a steadfast ambiguity.