Sterling Ruby, BigGrid / DACSKKKK, 2008, Formica, 3x7x7', courtesy of the artist and Marc Foxx Gallery, collection of Norman and Norah Stone, San Francisco, courtesy Thea Westreich Art Advisory Services, photo by Robert Wedemyer.

MOCA-LA
Pacific Design Center
8687 Melrose Avenue
213-621-1749
West Hollywood
MOCA Focus
Sterling Ruby,
Supermax 2008
June 19-
September 19, 2008

Organized by MOCA Curator Philipp Kaiser, MOCA Focus: Sterling Ruby, SUPERMAX 2008 features new monumental sculptures, paintings, and collages in an installation designed by the artist specifically for MOCA Pacific Design Center. With a wide-ranging oeuvre that sprawls across various media, draws from numerous sources, and defies stylistic categorization, Sterling Ruby is increasingly considered among the most inquisitive and intriguing artists of his generation.

Ruby’s work explores what the artist describes as “a dichotomy of repression and expression.” These concepts engage in a dialectical paradigm within which individual desires and gestures struggle with authority and control, evoking an ongoing process of becoming. As a method for exploring this condition, Ruby’s work often mimics and subverts the tropes of minimalism. One series of Formica-covered monoliths evokes the purity of minimalism — but the objects are smudged, beat up, and covered with appropriated street and prison graffiti. Ruby has also made it a point to exhibit his famously grotesque and protozoan ceramic sculptures atop pristine though exaggerated white cubes, an ironic reference to the minimalists’ disavowal of the pedestal in favor of sculpture’s direct interaction with the environment. In Ruby’s work, minimalism is not only a paradigmatic art movement but also a stand-in for an authoritarian system based on oppressive rules of inclusion and exclusion.

MOCA Focus: Sterling Ruby, SUPERMAX 2008 concludes Ruby’s trilogy of SUPERMAX exhibitions, which began with a 2005 installation at Marc Foxx Gallery in Los Angeles and continued with a 2006 installation at Galerie Christian Nagel in Cologne, Germany. The term “supermax” refers to the new breed of maximum-security prison where attempts at reform are eschewed in favor of an extreme enactment of justice upon the incarcerated. In Ruby’s work, the concept of the supermax prison functions as a metaphor for artistic ideology and constraints in general, while also referencing the museum as a potentially restrictive institution.

Sterling Ruby was born in Bitburg, Germany, in 1972 and lives and works in Los Angeles. He received his Master of Fine Arts degree from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena in 2005 and his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2002. Ruby’s work has had significant international exposure, including exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, Athens, Berlin, Cologne, Milan, and Chicago. He has been included in such group exhibitions as Red Eye: L.A. Artists from the Rubell Family Collection, Rubell Family Collection, Miami (2006); 2006 California Biennial, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, California; and Voiceovers, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), Los Angeles (2005). Ruby’s work is in the collections of the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Hammer Museum at UCLA, Los Angeles; and the Seattle Art Museum, among others.

Accompanying the exhibition is a 152-page soft-cover catalogue that includes more than 150 full-color images. Designed by Michael Worthington, the book features an essay by exhibition curator Philipp Kaiser and texts by members of Sterling Ruby Studio. MOCA Focus: Sterling Ruby, SUPERMAX 2008 is available for $24.95 at all MOCA Store locations and is distributed through Distributed Art Publishers (D.A.P.).

Sterling Ruby, SP21,2008, spray paint on canvas, 100 x 144", courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, photo by Robert Wedemyer.

Sterling Ruby, Headless Dick, 2008, Formica, 150 x 180', courtesy of the artist and Foxy Production, photo by Robert Wedemeyer.

Sterling Ruby, Superoverpass, 2007, Formica, wood, screws, glue, 88 x 32 x 48", courtesy of the artist and Foxy Production, New York, photo by Mark-Woods.com.