PRESENTATION: Sterling Ruby-THE MOUNTAIN
Sterling Ruby is celebrated for the dynamic and multifaceted nature of his artisticpractice, which spans a wide spectrum of disciplines including painting, ceramics, collage, video, photography, textiles, sculpture, and large-scale installations. Navigating effortlessly between traditional techniques and experimental materials, Ruby constructs a body of work that is as diverse in form as it is unified in vision. Despite its eclecticism, his oeuvre is anchored by a deeply considered and intellectually rigorous artistic strategy, reflecting a consistent interrogation of cultural, political, and aesthetic themes.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Gagosian Archive
In his latest exhibition, “THE MOUNTAIN,” Sterling Ruby enters into a thoughtful dialogue with the Romantic tradition of the sublime—those awe-striking encounters with nature that inspire both reverence and unease. Here, Ruby meditates on the primal cycles of life: germination, birth, growth, and eventual decay. These themes are not abstract for the artist—they’re drawn from his lived experience in California’s Eastern Sierra region, where the land itself tells stories of transformation. The exhibition spans beyond the walls of Gagosian, Gstaad, spilling out into the surrounding alpine town, integrating Ruby’s sculptures and paintings into the environment that inspired them. At the gallery’s main entrance, visitors are greeted by “Crying Slab” (2025), a monumental wood burl sculpture weeping puddled bronze tears. Carved from a once-living tree marked by disease and stress, this natural altar bears the scars of survival. It becomes a vessel for Ruby’s ongoing exploration of myth, metamorphosis, and emotion—evoking Surrealist animism to convey trauma, endurance, and the fragility of life. Much of Ruby’s practice draws from assemblage and casting, weaving organic found materials into a language shaped by Post-Minimalism and Arte Povera. These traditions emphasized the raw, the real, and the residual—qualities Ruby embraces by preserving the memory embedded in each branch, bone, or barn plank he repurposes. A series of new works on paper, all dated 2025 and part of his ongoing “DRFTRS” series (2013–), expand this vision. These pieces are part-collage, part-painting—delicate combinations of watercolor, gouache, and fragments from Ruby’s mountainous surroundings: pine cones, birds’ nests, pieces of bark and berry. They reimagine traditional botanical studies through the lens of abstraction, allowing nature to speak in a contemporary idiom. This instinct to lift directly from the land has even led Ruby to cultivate extensive gardens at his Vernon studio—far from the wilderness of Mammoth, but still rooted in the same curiosity about nature’s microcosms and rituals of renewal. One of the exhibition’s most striking sculptures, “Sobbing Hippy” (2025), resurrects Ruby’s childhood in rural Pennsylvania. Carved from salvaged lumber taken from his family’s barn, the figure stands like a totem, a mix of personal memory and collective symbolism. With its braided limbs, floral motifs, and watchful eyes, it evokes the trail markers one might find deep in the backcountry—objects etched with histories of those who came before. Part guidepost, part guardian, it holds space for the emotional and material residue of passage. A new direction in the exhibition emerges with “Canoe / Lorelei” (2025), a glazed ceramic piece that marks a continuation of Ruby’s “Basin Theology” series (2009–). Composed of fragments salvaged from failed kiln firings, the sculpture becomes a meditation on loss, reinvention, and layered memory. Shaped like an open vessel with oars—part canoe, part reliquary—it references ancient funerary traditions where boats carried the dead across spiritual waters. Echoing Robert Rauschenberg’s “Combines,” Ruby’s canoe carries not just broken ceramics, but the latent narratives and haunted potential of every discarded shard. Scattered throughout both the gallery and the village of Gstaad is a constellation of tactile, intimate works, each one a curious object that fuses the natural with the fabricated. Bronze flowers and nuts, still bound by the skeletal remnants of the casting process, clay pods resembling skull-shaped berries, weathered wooden mallets holding flickering blue candles, molten ashtrays, and fantastical creatures sculpted in limestone and ceramic. These pieces blur the boundary between relic and invention, drawing us into a speculative world where mythology, ecology, and industrial process coexist. Taken together, “THE MOUNTAIN” is not just an exhibition—it’s an excavation. Sterling Ruby invites us to witness how matter, memory, and meaning intertwine; how decay is not an end, but a beginning; and how every surface—whether bark, bronze, or broken glaze—can speak if we know how to listen.
Photo: Sterling Ruby, DRFTRS (8828), 2025, Collage, paint, and glue on paper, 27 × 43 3/8 inches (68.6 × 110.2 cm), © Sterling Ruby, Photo: Sterling Ruby Studio, Courtesy the artist and Gagosian
Info: Gagosian, Promenade 79, Gstaad, Switzerland, Duration: 11/7-7/9/2025, 18:00, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-13:00 & 14:30-18:00, https://gagosian.com/
