London, The Saatchi Gallery, Abstract America: New Painting and Sculpture, 29 May, 2009 - 17 January, 2010
Catalogue Essay
Working across a variety of disciplines, the highly prolific Sterling Ruby creates striking works which invoke the Modernist and Minimalist movements yet keep their form and materiality utterly unique and contemporary. Ruby’s performance and ritualistic practice pays homage to his biggest influences, fellow Los Angeles artists Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy. Like their work, Ruby’s is extremely visceral with his large-scale spray-painted canvases of which SP58 is the most monumental to appear at auction. It is breathtakingly lurid and bright, with sharply-defined splatters of acrylic paint over blurred, neon topographical maps. The highly developed and worked abstract fields are reminiscent of graffiti-filled urban murals in which the perception of space is contorted, thus highlighting the flatness of the picture plane.