Post-War & Contemporary

Provenance:
ArtCrush (Aspen Art Museum Benefit), Aspen, CO, 4-6 Aug. 2010.
Private Collection, acquired at the above sale.
Their sale; Philips, New York, 19 Sept. 2013, lot 21.
Private Collection, New York, acquired at the above sale.

Sterling Ruby was born in 1972, to a Dutch mother and an American father on an American military base in Bitburg, Germany. As a young child Ruby and his family moved to the United States, where they settled in New Freedom, Pennsylvania. His encounter with the Amish culture of quilt making and crafts was to be an early inspiration for his later works in soft sculpture, textiles and ceramics. He studied art at the Pennsylvania School of Art and Design and later the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Ruby moved to Los Angeles in 2003, where he has resided since, to pursue his MFA at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. During that time he worked as a teaching assistant for the Contemporary artist Mike Kelley.

Sterling Ruby is known for his wide and unconventional variety of artistic methods and mediums. Over his career he has worked with sculpture, drawing, ceramics, painting and video. Ruby’s ceramic series are a large part of his creative practice and, although it has historically been considered a craft medium, Ruby upends tradition with his innovative and organic sculptural forms. Manipulated by hand as well as machine, these vessel-like sculptures are then finished with dense, lustrous glazes of multicolored hues that almost appear to drip from the surface.

Sterling Ruby is included in the public collections of the Guggenheim Museum, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; MoMA, NY; MoCA, Chicago; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; MoCA, Los Angeles; LACMA, Los Angeles; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; SFMOMA, San Francisco; MMFA, Montreal; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek; and Tate Modern, London.