Jed Morse on Sterling Ruby

Organized by the Nasher Sculpture Center, Sterling Ruby: Sculpture is the first museum survey of Ruby’s work in the medium, featuring nearly 30 sculptures ranging from the intimate to the monumental. The exhibition will be on view at the Nasher through April 21, 2019, and is accompanied by a lavishly illustrated catalogue featuring a new essay, “Sterling Ruby and the Transcendent Life of Objects,” by Nasher Chief Curator, and curator of the exhibition, Jed Morse. Parts of his catalogue essay have been excerpted and adapted here.

In 2008, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (MOCA) afforded Sterling Ruby his first solo museum presentation. Just three years after receiving his MFA from the ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California, Ruby had already produced a prodigious body of work encompassing a dizzying array of media including painting, sculpture, photography, video, prints, collage, and ceramics. With so much work to his credit, in such a short time, the accompanying catalogue more closely resembled a midcareer survey than an artist’s first museum exhibition. The works on view, newly made for the exhibition, were clustered together in and around a double-height atrium—a row of engraved, rectilinear formica sculptures, some of them topped with thickly glazed ceramics, crimson fiberglass drips, or blocks of swirling pools of cast resin, juxtaposed with enormous, vibrant red stalagmites of poured urethane over wood armatures and surrounded by large, abstract spray paintings and soft fabric drips.

Above: Sterling Ruby Consolidator, 2008–2009 Urethane, wood, and spray paint 69 x 92 x 253 in. (175.3 x 233.7 x 642.6 cm) Courtesy Sterling Ruby Studio Photo: Robert Wedemeyer, courtesy Sterling Ruby Studio © Sterling Ruby

Seductive in their colors, textures, and sensual forms, the works were problematic nonetheless: enigmatic letters, words, and phrases scrawled on the sculptures like graffiti turned them into urban koans, inviting deeper consideration. Collages nearby provided the visitor with a glimpse into the multifarious image bank the artist regularly mined—more thoroughly chronicled in the exhibition catalogue—which included prisons, crafts, Minimalist geometric structures, natural forms, knives, domestic interiors, transsexuality, banal landscape paintings, graffiti, and the casual images of sex and violence that pervade contemporary life.

The dense installation evoked the exhibition’s title, SUPERMAX 2008, referring to the prisons that supposedly hold the most violent inmates, in both its overwhelming presence and the sense of confinement and control it imposed on visitors. The exhibition also provided a thorough and palpable summary of the issues—artistic, philosophical, sociological, political, and personal—that preoccupied Ruby’s work to that point. Read the full story and more in the magazine below.