Sterling Ruby

Xavier Hufkens, Brussels 

Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2012

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate, although it fails to convey the metallic quality of the bronze paint. Condition: This work is in very good condition. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultraviolet light.
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Strewn with stippled fields of diffuse greys and blocked-in blacks, and carried by an undercurrent of resplendent shimmering copper paint, SP192 is a monumental work that exemplifies Sterling Ruby’s celebrated Spray-Paint series. Across the entirety of its vast expanse, it evokes a tough urban mood whilst simultaneously asserting this artist’s place within the canon of abstraction. In the past decade, Ruby has risen to global prominence through a highly varied visual language that encompasses everything from heavy ceramic vessels to bulging soft sculptures; from collage-paintings to the present Spray-Paint works. Based in Los Angeles, his works are now held in such prestigious institutional collections as the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

The Spray-Paint series was instigated in 2007. With its street-art medium so explicitly emphasised, it should be read as a clear attempt on the part of Ruby to identify his oeuvre with the American graffiti tradition. Ever since Jean-Michel Basquiat painted his SAMO slogans all over New York some thirty years previously, spray-paint has been used in art to symbolise the potent struggle of minorities in America; it is a radical form of mark-making that asserts dissidence and anarchism.

In the present work, Ruby has used spray-paint to create an impactful composition of bluish charcoal grey, punctuated with black dots and metallic copper slivers. Its layered, almost washed-out appearance is an intentional reference to the inevitable transience of so much urban graffiti – washed off or painted over by the local authorities. Ruby was experiencing this transience first hand at the time of the present work’s production: “My studio [in Los Angeles] was in Hazard Park, where the Avenues and MS13 gangs were fighting over drugs and territory. Their disputes were visually apparent through massive amounts of tagging. The city responded by sending out their anti-graffiti teams during the night. Power paint sprayers were used to cover up the day's graffiti in a muted wash of either beige or grey… All territorial clashes, aggressive cryptograms, and death threats were nullified into a mass of spray-painted gestures that had become nothing more than atmosphere, their violent disputes transposed into an immense, outdoor, nonrepresentational mural” (Sterling Ruby quoted in: Exh. Cat., Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art, The Painting Factory: Abstraction after Warhol, 2012, p. 190). That these works are as much about erasure as they are about mark-making makes them more redolent of Christopher Wool than of Basquiat. Wool is another artist who has relied upon graffiti to imbue his work with a sense of metropolitan menace, and regularly uses a greyscale palette comparable to that in the present work.

Ruby acknowledges the influence of the Abstract Expressionists upon his work. In the physicality and texture of the spray-painted surface of the present canvas, as well as in its ‘all-over’ composition with no discernible focal point or axis, we are certainly compelled to think of Jackson Pollock, whose works were covered in profusions of deftly flicked paint. The shimmering depth of Mark Rothko’s scumbled style is also evoked in Ruby’s spray paintings; an association that is particularly pronounced in the present work, which appears analogous to the black paintings that Rothko executed at the end of his life. As Ruby pronounced in 2013: “Rothko’s work is charged with an important spiritual power, it influenced me a lot” (Sterling Ruby in conversation with Jérôme Sans, ‘Schizophrenic Monuments’, L’Officiel Art, March-May 2013, p. 102). Thus, alongside the indisputable relevance of his work as a contemporary practice, this artist should be further considered as an important contributor to the continuing canon of American painting.