Sterling Ruby’s work engages a wide range of cultural excavations and historical lineages with formalist attitudes to reflect societal pressures of the present moment. Employing diverse aesthetic strategies and mediums— including sculpture, drawing, collage, ceramics, painting, and video—he examines the tensions between fluidity and stasis, Expressionism and Minimalism, the abject and the pristine.

Born on an American military base in Bitburg, Germany to a Dutch mother and an American father, he was raised in the United States, received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and an MFA from ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California. Drawing on Southern California’s vast, blurred urban-industrial landscape, and an intimate exposure in his youth to traditional arts and crafts, Ruby has developed a practice rooted in a unique amassment of American culture. He continues to live and work in Los Angeles.

Public collections include the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; LACMA, Los Angeles; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; MMFA, Montreal; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; MCA, Chicago; MOCA, Los Angeles; MoMA, NY; SFMOMA, San Francisco; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY; Tate Modern, London; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Whitney Museum of American Art, NY.

Photo credit: Melanie Schiff