Sterling Ruby
WINDOW QUILT/ZEN RIPPER, 2015
Bleached and dyed canvas and elastic
196 1/2h x 186 1/2w in
499.11h x 473.71w cm
The artist has two major presentations on view in Europe.
Sterling Ruby was pondering his installation at Sprüth Magers gallery as he turned to me in his trademark lean-in-to-listen voice, explaining that some pieces have been in the making for over a decade. “Sometimes you revisit things because it’s the perfect space,” he said. Indeed, his monumental tapestries and voluptuously glazed ceramics have a deserving host here across the Berlin gallery’s two-storey venue.
His exhibition In Warm Shroud. Kissing the Bloom Crux. A Frost Window, (on view from April 29 to June 30) which features a €50 silk-screen print edition to raise funds for Ukrainian refugees, marks a homecoming of sorts for the L.A.-based art star, back to his stomping ground in the art world. In Europe in 2019, he had debuted his fashion collection as a special guest at Florence’s premiere fashion trade show, Pitti Uomo. The art world—typically in denial of its own deep reliance on fashion bucks—rolled its eyes. The New Yorker ran a piece addressing the anxieties on his gallerists’ and collectors’ minds, that inevitably also gnawed at Ruby: Will a clothing line devalue his art?