Beschreibung:

Sterling Ruby Alabaster SR10-7 2010 acrylic in artist's frame 174.6 x 175.3 cm. (68 3/4 x 69 in.)
Provenance Pace Gallery, New York Catalogue Essay ‘I like to think about art as being similar to poetry: it can’t be proven. It just exists and there’s an aura about it that people get or don’t get.’ Sterling Ruby Sterling Ruby’s interdisciplinary works are visually charged indicators and allegories for the burdens that afflict contemporary existence, serving as a visual expression of his interest in psychology, industry, urban culture, and American society. The artist’s oeuvre channels the conflicts prevalent throughout contemporary society, engaging in irrationality and dysfunctional psychology, but more specifically focusing on the gap between the individual impulse and restrictions that abound due to mechanisms of social control. His multifaceted practice exploits limitations of form, scale and materials: a process which allows for this manipulation of abject or marginalised subject matter. Alabaster SR10-9 perfectly communicates the artist’s concern with such dichotomies: a patent rejection of the rigidity of minimal art, it is a quintessential example of Ruby’s attempt to breach the confines of societal structure. His critique of Minimalism and its repressive and rigid lines is evident in the present lot, where his commonly used‘dripping effect’ of acrylic paint acts as a strain disparately drenching the blank canvas – one which arguably reflects the strain that plague many in a society where repression, conformity and aggression are the norm. Applied with expressionistic fervour, the piece visually articulates Sterling Ruby’s struggle with the minimalist aim to represent objects with no personification, and simultaneously reveals a tension between decoration and defacement: as the artist himself states, 'Everything I do holds a kind of gesture in it. For me, it’s this kind of dramatic gesture. A truncated gesture. It’s like an expression that was at one point very fervent and then it just gets kind of stopped.' (Sterling Ruby in an interview with Hans-Maarten in Utopia Parkway, 10 December 2009.) Read More