ART CITIES: N.York-Sterling Ruby

Sterling Ruby has created a complex, ever-evolving artistic universe that oscillates between raw abjection and aestheticizing abstraction. His ceramics, sculptures, installations, textile works, videos and paintings are associated with a post-humanist view on culture. The Los Angeles-based artist is working on a map of our collective unconscious, with a particular focus on social topologies, as well as traumas and ruptures in post-war art history.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Sprüth Magers Gallery Archive

“Atropa”, is the title of a solo exhibition of all new works by Sterling Ruby, named for the nightshade genus (commonly known as deadly nightshade) that references Atropos— the Greek Fate who cuts the thread of life to bring death—the exhibition engages with the paradox the plant embodies: lethally toxic yet medicinally valuable, a convergence of destruction and restoration. This duality permeates the focused presentation, which features graphite drawings, small-scale pen-and-ink studies, and expressive watercolor collages alongside bronze flowers. Capturing flora in various states of bloom and decay, these pieces evoke the vanitas painting tradition and its meditation on mortality and impermanence.

The graphite drawings (all 2025) represent the culmination of a series Ruby began thirty years ago, characterized by their palimpsestic quality. Executed with raw energy and painstaking labor, these works prioritize instinctive gesture and automatic drawing over conventional representation. Arising from dense layers of frenetic lines, erasing and smudging, rhythmic textures coalesce into botanical forms, offering fragile glimpses of nature within their turbulent surfaces. Building upon Ruby’s obsessive mark-making, the pen-and-ink drawings (2024–25) deploy delicate, rapid lines that burst into dark, compulsive voids, from which petal and leaf shapes materialize. Rendered with relentless intensity, each motif collapses the boundary between what is seen and what is imagined—figuration emerging as a byproduct of the drawing process itself.

The watercolor collages extend the “DRFTRS” series (2013–present), in which fragmented photographic elements float through gestural painted landscapes. Here, blue washes establish atmospheric space against which a downed tree anchors the lower edge, demarcating a horizon line. This emphatic horizontality suggests stasis rather than the upward growth associated with vitality and life.

Two new “DRFTRS” subseries are included in the exhibition. In “SPLITTING” (2025), distorted, monochromatic collaged images of nature reference a psychological defense mechanism where perception polarizes into binary categories—wholly good or bad, absent any nuance. Works such as “Hippy” and “Kissing Hippies” (both 2025) employ watercolor stains to conjure faces of embracing figures crowned with wreaths against neutral grounds, invoking counterculture iconography, particularly the flower as symbol, an element central to Ruby’s broader visual vocabulary.

A new bronze series, “Bound Flower” (2025), is the exhibition’s sole sculptural component. Each unique work originates from a specimen cultivated in Ruby’s studio garden—cut, dried and directly cast, the burnout process incinerates the flower, creating a bronze ghost of the original. Significantly, finished pieces retain the utilitarian infrastructure of their fabrication: gates and sprues through which molten metal flowed remain attached, functioning as constraints that bind the botanical form in a state of arrested time.

Photo: DRFTRS (9061), 2025, Collage, paint, and glue on paper, 28.3 × 43.5 cm | 11 1/8 × 17 1/8 inches, © Sterling Ruby, Courtesy the artist and Sprüth Magers Gallery

Info: Sprüth Magers Gallery, 22 East 80th Street, 2nd Floor New York, NY , USA, Duration: 30/1-28/3/2026, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://spruethmagers.com/