Sterling Ruby: The TURBINE Trailblazer

Dec 3, 2022

Sterling Ruby looks like the kind of Los Angeles artist you would expect; Dutch American surfer good looks with a Kurt Cobain grunge edge. He’s that super cool dude/artist you love to hate and hate that you love. These are funny times, we aren’t sure we’re allowed to love art that comes from assumed white male privilege. Then you realize he was born on a Bitburg Air Base, Germany, and grew up on a farm in Pennsylvania Dutch Country, where he learned quilt-making and redware pottery from the Amish. This shaped his multidisciplinary garment, sculpture and ceramics practice. The foundation of Ruby’s brilliance is that American hybrid of a craft-making farm boy and well-educated LA converted savvy. Ruby graduated from the Pennsylvania College of Art and Design, Lancaster, in 1996. He received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2002, followed by an MFA from the ArtCenter College of Design, Pasadena, California, in 2005. Jackson Pollock comes to mind. Pollock was a refreshing game changer, a rugged, turbulent character born in Cody, Wyoming and raised in Arizona, Chico and Los Angeles, California. Pollock radicalized the Abstract Expressionist movement, along with his AbEx peers including his wife, Lee Krasner, positioning New York and America as a competitor on the global art market.

In 2022, Ruby’s TURBINES are also a refreshing game changer. Who isn’t a bit tired of going to galleries and fairs and seeing the same ultra-contemporary, pristine figurative paintings with a superficial narrative? But it’s not just the relief you feel, it’s that Ruby seems to be reinventing the abstract. The best paintings of 2022, are finding the balance between cognitive composition and allowing the subconscious to happen; control in harmony with letting go. For Ruby, the order is in the careful cardboard construction as a semi-relief layer. The chaos is in the massive Expressionist brushed-out vibrant paint and the marks of his own physical presence in the work. The TURBINES series is stepped on, hands and footprints are visible and blotches of paint are allowed to be part of the process. Weathered cardboard shapes that resemble forms of transportation: a plane, a bus on a road, a boat, are not representational, as Ruby explains: 

I wanted these paintings to feel turbulent, frenetic, and convulsive. I keep asking myself, how can I make something that inevitably reflects the charged time in which we live, to evoke a political tension, without being explicitly bound to that interpretation? —Sterling Ruby 

Like Pollock, Ruby is defiant and in control of his own identity. Bold moves pay off. Pollock responded to Hans Hoffman’s comment, “you do not paint from nature”, with “I am nature” as if to say the work represents me, I don’t subscribe to prescribed representational content. The TURBINE paintings are both an emotional response as well as a critic of contemporary social and political faux pas. Ruby has cited the influence of various works, including Giacomo Balla’s painting The Spell Is Broken (1920) and El Lissitzky’s Prounenraum (Proun Room) (1923). Ironically, Balla’s Futurist optimism about innovation and industrialization is oppositional to Ruby’s cardboard forms SUGGESTING the effects of modernization on a 21st-century environmental crisis. The architectural influence of the Russian Constructivists is evident in the cardboard material and the linear nature of the painted foreground. 

Sterling Ruby - TURBINE. GABAPENTIN., 2022  Acrylic, oil, and cardboard on canvas, 126 x 96 inches.  © Sterling Ruby. Exhibited at STERLING RUBY. TURBINES. show at Gagosian, West 21st Street, New York. Photo by Amanda Wall

TURBINES as an exhibition is a commanding presence in the otherwise grandiose and sterile space. Immediately you feel the powerful punch of primary and secondary colors, but sometimes the background is a quiet tone of pink or neutral off-white. The inner child, box of crayons, the palette seems naive, like boyhood memories of matchbox cars and trucks. Boy’s toys used to be a message that cars, trucks, planes and guns were cool, even masculine or cisgender defining. Now, it seems fitting boys should return to playing with Star Wars spaceships since it might be how we escape our own self-destruction. At least, in recent films and Netflix series, this has been a common prediction of our survival. Compelling art is often in sync with pop culture obsessions. Andy Warhol ignited that fire from the 60s to the 80s. Ruby denies a literal political agenda but the more you look at TURBINES the more you want to connect all of the painted dots and splatters. He’s evasive and refuses to answer the questions, like Warhol. It comes with earning the right to be vague. 

Sterling Ruby - TURBINE. IRIDES., 2022  Acrylic, oil, and cardboard on canvas, 126 x 96 inches. © Sterling Ruby. Exhibited at STERLING RUBY. TURBINES. show at Gagosian, West 21st Street, New York. Photo by Amanda Wall

Trying not to force a read, the TURBINE paintings are dynamic and dominant. The experience is the marriage between an emotional response and thought-provoking contemplation. At first sight, you feel charged by the dramatic scale, excitable bright color, expressive sprays of paint and the just let it happen moments. Then, you investigate the cardboard constructions and it’s methodical, intentional. Ruby succeeds in merging the expressive with the calculated, an ongoing, complex push and pull for artists. TURBINE. GABAPENTIN is both tranquil and frenetic. Curiously, the title suggests a state of medicated relief from pain. A turbine provides a source of energy that nature provides, therefore Ruby’s contradictions are psychologically perplexing and intriguing but accurate in reflecting our society of progress juxtaposed with political regression. 

TURBINE. SHAKING HAND WITH BOMBS sounds like a humorous critic of geriatric world leaders with the power to launch nuclear missiles, but that’s too specific. Let art be the mirror of society. Ruby reflects on his perception of what being an artist meant growing up in a non-cultural environment in ICA Boston’s Behind the Scenes with Sterling Ruby. He explains that he was aware that in being an artist there was a sense of freedom, rebellion and autonomy and that appealed to his manic personality. What an artist reveals about themselves is key to understanding the work. In that vulnerability lies the real biography.

Featured image: Sterling Ruby - TURBINE. SHAKING HAND WITH BOMBS (RIGHT)., 2022  Acrylic, oil, and cardboard on canvas, 96 X 126 inches. © Sterling Ruby. Exhibited at STERLING RUBY. TURBINES. show at Gagosian, West 21st Street, New York. Photo by Amanda Wall
Text by Amanda Wall