Lot Essay
Sterling Ruby’s SP58 marries spray paint and acrylic to produce a work of chromatic beauty, an abstracted graffiti painting that is nothing short of exhilarant in its scale, color, and texture. SP58 is what Ruby has referred to as an “illicit merger,” an unexpected combination of the dense atmospheric effects of color field painting with graffitied symbols and scribbles. The latter element intriguingly constitutes a “self-inflicted vandalism” inspired by gang tagging that the artist observed in Los Angeles where he lives and works (P. Kaiser, ed., MOCA Focus: Sterling Ruby – SUPERMAX 2008, exh. cat., Museum of Contemporary Art, Pacific Design Center, Los Angeles, 2008, p. 17). The flattened, neon-splashed result subverts supposed divisions between movements, styles, and rhetorics to occupy a unique aesthetic position, one that exquisitely captures a postmodern urbanity with “a post-apocalyptic character” (B. Walsh, “The Survivalist: Q+A With Sterling Ruby,” Art in America, March 18 2011). Notably, this perfervid piece was previously in the renowned Saatchi Collection of British advertising executive and Young British Artists star-maker Charles Saatchi and exhibited in his major survey exhibition Abstract America: New Painting and Sculpture in 2009-10.
SP58 is among Ruby’s earliest monumental spray paint compositions. It is part of a celebrated body of work that emerged from the artist’s observations of “tagging, vandalism and the power struggles associated with gang graffiti” in the area around his studio in Hazard Park, Los Angeles (B. Walsh, “The Survivalist: Q+A With Sterling Ruby,” Art in America, March 18 2011). To make the painting, Ruby approached the canvas as if he were drawing and tagged it in vibrant colors. The artist then ritualistically and repeatedly went back over the tags with dark paint, intricately working the piece’s surface. The resultant sfumato haze that partially conceals the original signage is reminiscent of city governments’ efforts to cover up or “mute” graffiti with regular applications of neutrally colored paint by power paint sprayers. Observing these cyclical battles over public space in his urban environs, Ruby has noted, “All territorial clashes, aggressive cryptograms, and death threats were nullified into a mass of spray-painted gestures that became nothing more than atmosphere, their violent disputes transposed into an immense, outdoor, nonrepresentational mural” (S. Ruby quoted in The Painting Factory: Abstraction after Warhol, exh. cat., Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2012, p. 190). SP58 thus involves competing elements: the effulgent, additive excess that arises from the act of compulsive tagging and the painstaking exertion of formal aesthetic control in the subsequent application of dark, cloaking paint. The result is a dialectical patchwork of expression and repression, an aesthetic of urban decay, detritus, and dispute.
SP58 draws from numerous sources and reference points, which it brings together in a heterogeneous and even contradictory constellation. In a fertile mix of “high” and “low” culture, the painting constitutes a “cross-breeding [of] high Modernist abstraction with LA gangs’ colour fixation” (J. Meyers, “Who Is Sterling Ruby?”, Frieze, Issue 122, April 2009, p. 100). Ruby’s spray paint work borrows from the chromatic scheme and ordered geometric structures of Minimalism without engaging with Minimalism’s more rigid ideologies. At the same time, it “brings Oldenburg’s wry postwar Pop to its postindustrial conclusion” (B. Walsh, “The Survivalist: Q+A With Sterling Ruby,” Art in America, March 18 2011) in a vision of a fractured America at odds with itself. The influence of fellow Angeleno artist Mike Kelley, under whom Ruby served as a teaching assistant, is also evident in the work at hand, as it is in much of Ruby’s oeuvre.
Sterling Ruby, who The New York Times art critic Roberta Smith described as “one of the most interesting artists to emerge in this century,” is a true polymath, working in painting, video, sculpture, ceramics, collage, installations, drawings, and photographs (R. Smith, “Art in Review – Sterling Ruby / Chron & Kiln Works,” The New York Times, March 21, 2008). He produced his first large-scale spray painting in 2007, just one year prior to the creation of the present lot. While Ruby’s oeuvre is intimately associated with Los Angeles in form and content, the artist was actually born in Bitburg, Germany in 1972, to a Dutch mother and an American father. He proceeded to spend his youth on the East Coast of the United States in Maryland and Pennsylvania. Ruby studied at agriculture school and held a job in construction before going on to study art at universities in Chicago, Pasadena, and Los Angeles. While he was still a student in 2003, the artist had his first solo exhibition. Acclaimed solo shows at prestigious institutions at home and abroad, including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Centre d’Art Contemporai in Geneva, the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea in Rome, and the Baltimore Museum of Art, soon followed.
With formal intelligence and downtown verve, the energetic SP58 is a breathtaking exemplar—brightly colored and blurred as if vibrating—of Ruby’s painted oeuvre. The aesthetic and conceptual complexity that the artist carefully builds into the work’s pop-colored façade is rich and multilayered, at once a “structural breakdown [and] the beginning of new possibilities” (C. Bollen, “L.A. Artworld: Sterling Ruby, Painter, Mixed-Media Artist, Ceramicist, Sculptor,” Interview, December-January 2011, p. 114).
“One of the most interesting artists to emerge in this century, Ruby is a true polymath, working in painting, video, sculpture, ceramics, collage, installations, drawings, and photographs (R. Smith, “Art in Review - Sterling Ruby / Chron & Kiln Works,” The New York Times, March 21, 2008).
SP58 is among Ruby’s earliest monumental spray paint compositions. It is part of a celebrated body of work that emerged from the artist’s observations of “tagging, vandalism and the power struggles associated with gang graffiti” in the area around his studio in Hazard Park, Los Angeles (B. Walsh, “The Survivalist: Q+A With Sterling Ruby,” Art in America, March 18 2011). To make the painting, Ruby approached the canvas as if he were drawing and tagged it in vibrant colors. The artist then ritualistically and repeatedly went back over the tags with dark paint, intricately working the piece’s surface. The resultant sfumato haze that partially conceals the original signage is reminiscent of city governments’ efforts to cover up or “mute” graffiti with regular applications of neutrally colored paint by power paint sprayers. Observing these cyclical battles over public space in his urban environs, Ruby has noted, “All territorial clashes, aggressive cryptograms, and death threats were nullified into a mass of spray-painted gestures that became nothing more than atmosphere, their violent disputes transposed into an immense, outdoor, nonrepresentational mural” (S. Ruby quoted in The Painting Factory: Abstraction after Warhol, exh. cat., Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2012, p. 190). SP58 thus involves competing elements: the effulgent, additive excess that arises from the act of compulsive tagging and the painstaking exertion of formal aesthetic control in the subsequent application of dark, cloaking paint. The result is a dialectical patchwork of expression and repression, an aesthetic of urban decay, detritus, and dispute.
SP58 draws from numerous sources and reference points, which it brings together in a heterogeneous and even contradictory constellation. In a fertile mix of “high” and “low” culture, the painting constitutes a “cross-breeding [of] high Modernist abstraction with LA gangs’ colour fixation” (J. Meyers, “Who Is Sterling Ruby?”, Frieze, Issue 122, April 2009, p. 100). Ruby’s spray paint work borrows from the chromatic scheme and ordered geometric structures of Minimalism without engaging with Minimalism’s more rigid ideologies. At the same time, it “brings Oldenburg’s wry postwar Pop to its postindustrial conclusion” (B. Walsh, “The Survivalist: Q+A With Sterling Ruby,” Art in America, March 18 2011) in a vision of a fractured America at odds with itself. The influence of fellow Angeleno artist Mike Kelley, under whom Ruby served as a teaching assistant, is also evident in the work at hand, as it is in much of Ruby’s oeuvre.
Sterling Ruby, who The New York Times art critic Roberta Smith described as “one of the most interesting artists to emerge in this century,” is a true polymath, working in painting, video, sculpture, ceramics, collage, installations, drawings, and photographs (R. Smith, “Art in Review – Sterling Ruby / Chron & Kiln Works,” The New York Times, March 21, 2008). He produced his first large-scale spray painting in 2007, just one year prior to the creation of the present lot. While Ruby’s oeuvre is intimately associated with Los Angeles in form and content, the artist was actually born in Bitburg, Germany in 1972, to a Dutch mother and an American father. He proceeded to spend his youth on the East Coast of the United States in Maryland and Pennsylvania. Ruby studied at agriculture school and held a job in construction before going on to study art at universities in Chicago, Pasadena, and Los Angeles. While he was still a student in 2003, the artist had his first solo exhibition. Acclaimed solo shows at prestigious institutions at home and abroad, including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Centre d’Art Contemporai in Geneva, the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea in Rome, and the Baltimore Museum of Art, soon followed.
With formal intelligence and downtown verve, the energetic SP58 is a breathtaking exemplar—brightly colored and blurred as if vibrating—of Ruby’s painted oeuvre. The aesthetic and conceptual complexity that the artist carefully builds into the work’s pop-colored façade is rich and multilayered, at once a “structural breakdown [and] the beginning of new possibilities” (C. Bollen, “L.A. Artworld: Sterling Ruby, Painter, Mixed-Media Artist, Ceramicist, Sculptor,” Interview, December-January 2011, p. 114).
“One of the most interesting artists to emerge in this century, Ruby is a true polymath, working in painting, video, sculpture, ceramics, collage, installations, drawings, and photographs (R. Smith, “Art in Review - Sterling Ruby / Chron & Kiln Works,” The New York Times, March 21, 2008).