Sterling Ruby valuation
Los Angeles artist of spray paintings, ceramics, poured urethane and soft sculpture, with a hand in fashion.
Sterling Ruby was born in 1972 on the US air base at Bitburg in West Germany, to a Dutch mother and an American father, and grew up in New Freedom, Pennsylvania.
What a work by Sterling Ruby is worth
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Bio
Sterling Ruby was born in 1972 on the US air base at Bitburg in West Germany, to a Dutch mother and an American father, and grew up in New Freedom, Pennsylvania. After working in construction he studied at the Pennsylvania School of Art and Design, at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he took his BFA in 2002, and at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, where he was a teaching assistant to Mike Kelley. He has lived and worked in Los Angeles since. His output is very large and spans many materials: the SP paintings, wide fields of sprayed colour drawn from gang tagging and urban graffiti; ceramics, including the Basin Theology vessels; the Monument Stalagmites of poured urethane; collages of bleached denim and studio cardboard; soft sculptures; and working stoves in cast iron and bronze. He has worked closely with Raf Simons on fashion, and in 2019 launched his own label, S.R. STUDIO. LA. CA.
The spray paintings, acrylic on canvas and titled SP with a number, are the works seen most often at auction; the large canvases are unique, and the sprayed surface is fragile and very hard to retouch invisibly. Ceramics, collages and sculpture come up as well, each its own category, and the ceramics in particular should be checked for chips and repairs. Provenance through his galleries and the studio's documentation settle most questions.
Bitburg, Chicago and SUPERMAX 2008
SUPERMAX 2008 was a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and in 2019 the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas showed nearly thirty of his large sculptures.
In 2012 Raf Simons used images of four of his paintings in dresses and a coat for his first haute couture collection at Dior.
Vernon, EXHM and the stoves
Ruby's family moved from Germany to Baltimore and then to New Freedom, where he went to Kennard-Dale High School before working in construction in Washington. At the Art Institute of Chicago he worked for the Video Data Bank under Kate Horsfield, and at Art Center he studied with Diana Thater, Richard Hawkins, Sylvère Lotringer and Laurence Rickels. His studio is in Vernon, south of downtown Los Angeles. The collages run in named series, among them Mapping, DRFTRS, TRANSCOMPOSITIONAL, SPCE, EXHM, ECLPSE and BC: EXHM, short for exhumation, is cut from the cardboard that protects the studio floor when urethane is poured, and BC, for Bleach Collage, from bleached denim and canvas in the manner of Gee's Bend quilts and Japanese boro.
On the large bronzes, cast in sections and joined, he leaves the welds unground so that they keep a rainbow patina, which is the intended finish and not a fault. The working stoves, in bronze, cast iron or steel, began in 2012 and recall the wood-burning stove that heated the Pennsylvania farm where he grew up; a 17-foot STOVE was kept burning in a Basel square during Art Basel in 2013. The ceramics owe something to the German lava-glazed vessels of the 1970s, and the soft sculptures include vampire mouths dripping fabric blood. Roberta Smith of the New York Times has called him one of the most interesting artists to emerge this century.
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