The Drawing Center

Sterling Ruby addresses notions of violence, repression and social control through a diverse artistic practice, incorporating sculpture, video, photography, drawing, collage and installation. Through visceral, cryptic and architectonic motifs, ranging from "Supermax" prisons to biomorphic forms, Ruby trades medium-specificity for an exploration of shifting borders of social and subjective experience that propose a self-styled “amorphous law.” Sterling Ruby: CHRON will present a survey of the LA-based artist’s work in drawing with approximately fifty works spanning from 2003 to the present, including several new large-scale works conceived for the Drawing Room. The exhibit will foreground the role of drawing as medium, gesture and act, in Ruby’s multivalent body of work—from graffiti-based spray paint drawings to photographic collages, nail polish abstractions, and inscribed Formica sculptures—which when viewed together reveal formal and thematic connections informed by the artist’s background in drawing.

Above: Sterling Ruby, Prison (detail), 2004. Collage and pencil on paper, 31 1/2 x 23 3/4 inches.