Vienna, July 7, 2016
Winterpalais
Himmelpfortgasse 8
1010 Vienna, Austria
Opening Hours:
Daily 10 am to 6 pm
Press Downloads:
belvedere.at/press
Contact:
Press 21er Haus
+43 (0) 1 795 57-338
+43 (0) 664 800 141 185
[email protected]
S.R.BELVEDERE.1, 2016, Courtesy Sterling Ruby Studio
STERLING RUBY
July 8 to October 16, 2016
From July 8th to October 16th, 2016, the stately baroque rooms of the Winterpalais will provide the
backdrop for the first major European survey of the American artist, Sterling Ruby (born 1972). Known not
only in hometown, Los Angeles, but also internationally, Ruby is heralded as one of the most fascinating and
controversial artists of his generation.
He will present works made over the last decade that include sculptures in ceramic, bronze, steel and
urethane. His Soft Sculptures, hanging mobiles and a new series of tapestries can also be seen. The focus of
the show deals with military imperialism and the rhetoric of war as a clear homage to the man responsible
for the construction of the Winterpalais, Prince Eugene of Savoy.
"Throughout his diverse oeuvre, Sterling Ruby tends to engage with subjects that some may consider
uncomfortable. Alongside autobiographical aspects, his works also address socio-political grievances,
societal problems and violence. I am particularly pleased that Ruby will follow Olafur Eliasson as already the
second artist who has accepted the challenge to design works specifically for the Winterpalais. The
resulting contemporary situational works present a symbiosis with the stately rooms and the history of this
house, which is quite unique,” said Director of the Belvedere and the 21er Haus, Agnes Husslein-Arco.
According to the exhibition’s curator, Mario Codognato: “Sterling Ruby’s works use, represent, and at the
same time effectively condemn aggression – a forced and explosive occupation. The way in which the
traditional materials of art, from canvas to ceramic, iron to bronze, are attacked and blown up in a violated,
wounded, splattered image, is reminiscent of the devastating brutality of attack and destruction.”
It is in fact collage and its potential for disorientation and dissonance which appears to permeate the entire
corpus of Sterling Ruby’s work. He takes over materials, techniques, images and objets trouvés, idioms and
slang, static equilibriums, ratios of force and construction models, to then overturn their meaning and
appearance in order to form completely new and independent visual aggregates and apparatuses.
Exemplary in this process are the SCALES, mobiles which dismember and free objects from their mass and
their weight by suspending them from the ceiling. Steel fragments and chains that form beautifully drawn
arches are combined with drug test kits, bottles of bleach, trash cans and packaging materials. In these
three-dimensional collage works, Ruby recalls both Alexander Calder and Bruce Nauman.
Sterling Ruby's Soft Sculptures appear as giant anthropomorphic or mummy-like figures with long tentacles.
These sculptures made of fabric broach the subjects of gender, domesticity and "feminine" handicrafts
such as sewing and quilt-making. The series entitled FIGURES consists of two inextricably linked doll-like
bodies. CANDLES presents a material translation, wax becomes folksy-fleece fabric.
Also on view are sculptures from the series ACTS – the artist’s acronym for Absolute Contempt for Total
Serenity. In these works liquid ink is poured into transparent urethane blocks. These blocks "rest" on
Formica pedestals in a way that negates their supposed gravity and weight. On the other hand, the metal
sculptures in his series known as MS refer to guns and models of skyscrapers in their reduced welded
aesthetic.
The huge tapestries on view were made exclusively for the Winterpalais. These FLAGS are made of bleached
denim and canvas dyed in bright pink, yellow, blue and red. Up to seven meters long, the tapestries
fluctuate between painting and handicraft, simultaneously quoting the American flag, Robert
Rauschenberg’s post-modern compositions and traditional Amish quilts. The exhibition includes two
ceramic works, Basin Theology/FFMRC from the series called Basin Theology, as well as Sandal; which
presents a sandal with its tattered edges, the impression of five toes appearing deeply born into the sole,
having been worn away by flesh over time, the imprint of which seems to have been solidified like a fossil.
Visitors are invited to share their photos using #SterlingRuby and #Winterpalais.
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Photo: © Melanie Schiff, Courtesy Sterling Ruby Studio
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Sterling Ruby was born in 1972 on an American Air Force base in Bitburg, Germany. He received a BFA at
the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a MFA at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA.
Ruby’s work has been shown in the exhibition Made in L.A. 2016: a, the, though, only at the Hammer
Museum, Los Angeles; the Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2014), New York; the
Taipei Biennial at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (2014); the Gwangju Biennale (2014); and in solo exhibitions
at the Baltimore Museum of Art (2014); the Fondazione Memmo, Rome (2013); the Museo d’Arte
Contemporanea, Rome (2013); the Kunsthalle Mainz, Germany (2013); the Centre d’Art Contemporain,
Geneva (2012); the Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm (2012/13); the FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Reims,
France (2012); the GAMeC – Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo, Italy (2008 / 09); The
Drawing Center, New York (2008); and the MOCA – Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2008).
His work is included in numerous public collections including at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New
York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the MCA – Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago;
the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the SAM – Seattle Art Museum; the MOCA – Museum of Contemporary
Art, North Miami; the MOCA – Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the LACMA – Los Angeles
County Museum of Art; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the MoMA – Museum of Modern Art, New York;
the SFMOMA – San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; the Centre
Pompidou, Paris; the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark; the Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Istanbul
Modern; and Tate Modern, London.
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CURATOR’S FOREWORD
by Mario Codognato
“In the depths of the forest your image follows me.” Jean Racine, Phèdre, 1677
“From the original watchtower through the anchored balloon to the reconnaissance aircraft and remote
sensing-satellites, one and the same function has been indefinitely repeated, the eye's function being the
function of a weapon.” Paul Virilio
In the famous The Art of War essay inspired by the teachings of the Chinese general Sun Tzu and
presumably written in the 4th century BC, battlegrounds are classified in nine types: scattered, easy,
challenged, open, where major roads cross, dangerous, difficult, closed off or hopeless. The terrain of art
appears to embody all of these at the same time. An exhibition that takes shape and develops in the
Winterpalais in Vienna inevitably brings to mind the historical and political figure who commissioned the
building, Prince Eugene of Savoy, who at the end of the seventeenth century was one of the most important
and influential military figures of his time and arguably in the history of modern Europe. The spirit,
representation and iconology of his military feats, and therefore of his influence on the geopolitical structure
of his time, permeate the adjoining rooms of the Winterpalais. Very often the dynamics and strategies for
visibility of cultural avant-garde movements in general, and of contemporary art in particular, have been
associated metaphorically, and at times almost paradoxically, with military ones, as if the work of art and its
message were to take military action in occupying a territory, the same territory defined by the surface of
the work and the broader and intangible territory of its action and influence in society. This dynamic is even
more apparent and its metaphor even more evident in and applicable to Sterling Ruby’s oeuvre.
His works use, represent, and at the same time effectively condemn aggression, a forced and explosive
occupation. The use of the most widely differing and diversifying techniques, collage and the deconstruction
of images from very different sources, the constant gear change from figurative to abstract, from
amorphous to readymade, the sharp superimposing of scale among the objects and the bewildering foray
into design and fashion, resemble an all-out war strategy, with all means deployed on and directed towards
the voracious stage of the contemporary art arena. The way in which the traditional materials of art, from
canvas to ceramic, iron to bronze, are attacked and blown up in a violated, wounded, splattered image, is
reminiscent of the devastating brutality of attack and destruction. The rational and utilitarian geometry of
the objects and architectures is adjusted and targeted as in a bombing, an explosion. In his work, the actual
human figure, whether present, hinted at or simulated, is always deformed, bruised, erased or flattened in a
stain or pulp, or is reduced to a shred of body or garment, an unnatural flaccidity. Assemblies of welded iron
rods or of other metal plates also end up revealing an anthropomorphic nature in which the verticality
reminds us of a human body in its essence, in a skeletal or crudely undernourished dimension, while the
horizontality references a maimed, fragmented and truncated dimension of a limb or rib.
The verticality of Giacometti’s figures or the horizontal prone position of Brancusi’s heads are represented in
the pared-down and “suburban do-it-yourself” aesthetic of the assembly of pieces of metal – spectral
architectures in a city in ruins or a district still under development. Outstanding among his ceramics is that
of a sandal with torn outline, the shape of the five toes as if attacked, the flesh stripped off, and the shape
fossilised in the material. It appears cast not in the ceramic blast furnace but instead in an atomic
holocaust, abandoned in some site of a mass murder, a Gradiva whose grace and movement have been
interrupted and tortured.
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In another ceramic, a round bowl containing a semicircular tube, Basin Theology/Mandelin Reagent (2012),
becomes a votive receptacle as the title suggests, ambivalently contaminated and saved at the same time
by the Mandelin reagent, a reagent which allows identification, thanks to a specific color range, of the
presence of toxic substances and synthetic drugs such as Ecstasy, hence the association with the
theological dimension, inspired by the association between the effect of the substance and the ecstasy of
Baroque saints. A chemical and symbolic transubstantiation that, as in a collage, also a linguistic one, forms
a short circuit, also plastic, through the destructive and cumulative fragmentation of the image.
It is in fact collage and its potential for disorientation and eternal ambivalence which appears to permeate
the entire corpus of Sterling Ruby’s work. He takes over materials, techniques, images and objets trouvés,
idioms and slang, static equilibriums, ratios of force and construction models, to then overturn their
meaning and appearance in order to form completely new and independent visual aggregates and
apparatuses, yet deliberately filled at the same time with the residues and detritus of their origin, performing
that total revolution of the object described by André Breton, deviating them from their purpose and causing
them to be taken into consideration, due in fact to the doubt that may arise as to their previously intended
use. Exemplary in this process are the SCALES, mobiles which dismember and free objects from their mass
and their weight, suspending them from the ceiling. Like the mobiles by Alexander Calder, they constantly
redefine the surrounding space as they move, and like the objets trouvés in the Scales by Robert
Rauschenberg they take on a pictorial quality through the appealing multi-coloured packaging of the
objects, or as in SCALE (5415) S.R. CLOR (2015) through the splattering of plain weave trousers, at the
boundary between real and painted object which references the informal or abstract expressionism
tradition.
In another series of works presented last year at a major show in Paris, Ruby had the parts of a
decommissioned U.S. Navy submarine divided up and reassembled, after having been found by accident in
a sort of scrap yard near his studio in Los Angeles. What previously was a large war machine is transformed
into a hybrid, into a metal cadavre exquis which, in a collage of giant mechanical parts, repositions and
decodes the sinister and disconcerting warfaring purpose of its previously intended use into an almost
playful monumental quality deliberately an end in itself, in bachelor machines which underline the
subversive potential of the artistic act in reshuffling the factors of history. The large wall hangings on which
Ruby has worked in recent years move along the same lines, installed in the rooms of the Winterpalais, as in
the seventeenth century, the period in which the palace was built for Prince Eugene, with the Flemish
tapestries that very often celebrated past and present battles and military victories. In a total overturning of
the celebratory and dedicatory intent of war, these works deconstruct and decode war rhetoric, and at the
same time update its imagery through the use of visual structures which clearly refer to contemporary
warfare.
The colors or symbols of American flags or those of the countries invaded by the US in recent decades, or
the frottage of the floor in his studio, reconstruct and suggest the bird’s eye view of a desert territory taken
by a military drone. The latter has made a forceful entry into collective imagery through constant repetition
in the media and it is probably the most innovative, revolutionary, and controversial element, not only from
the military viewpoint but also from the ethical and political standpoint in the recent history of international
conflicts. As Jean Baudrillard had already realized during the first Gulf War (1991), all the images of the
conflict that reached the media were generated by AWACS radar aircraft and spy satellites directly
controlled by the US military command; they therefore could not be checked by independent sources and in
fact were screened and constructed. These same technologies then ended up by entering our lives through
applications that have become part of daily use, such as GPS or Google Earth, which then in turn reproduce
and represent the same aesthetic of omnivisibility, the same ethical problems of potential and factual
control and disciplining of military drones, and which Ruby uses in his wall hangings.
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The creative fascination which artists in the Sixties had with the Moon landing or space conquests is
transformed in the second millennium into the angst of hypercontrol of individuals and the hyper-reality of
new flight technologies which, although extremely more powerful than the human eye, have limits of
perception connected to the capacities of resolution of the images they produce. Ruby highlights these
problems, through the synoptic capacity of art, in a collage that does not collect and recompose just
images, but also the questions and contradictions that they represent, maintaining and reproducing the
same ambivalence of the fragmentation of the real as that of the mediatic world.
Ruby gives shape and body to images that are otherwise virtual and in any case always mediated by
electronic devices. The corporal and tactile theme permeates another series of works, crucial in the corpus
of work by Ruby, the famous Soft Sculptures. Giant anthropomorphic figures of which Laying Figure (2013) is
possibly the most emblematic within this context, a kind of enormous elongated cushion, midway between
aircraft and a limbless human being, is wound or rather imprisoned like an Egyptian mummy in a fabric
which references the motifs of the American flag. Like a disproportionately overgrown toy gun, it brings into
play our perception of conflicts at a spectacular level in contrast with those who actually suffer bombing.
Other Figures are anthropomorphic beings with large tentacles, the presumed security and the presumed
comfort of their smoothness and softness peeling away in their sinister scale ratio, in their mortuary and
embalmed position, an oxymoron rigor mortis where the muscle stiffness is contradicted by the softness of
the material.
Contrarily, the sheets of urethane and Formica of the ACTS (acronym of Absolute Contempt for Total
Serenity) mimic the immortalising monumental quality, the hieratic and the authority of marble, giving at the
same time a sense of instability and precariousness, also thanks to the off-axis overlapping of the two
blocks which form the whole. A misalignment which deliberately, as in all the works by Ruby, makes the
uncertain certain, the certain uncertain, the ambivalent that which is familiar, and the familiar that which is
ambivalent, fiction likely, and fake as that which can be verified.
ABOUT THE WINTERPALAIS
The Belvedere Museum, founded in 1903 as the Moderne Galerie, houses Austrian art from the Middle Ages
to the present day including the world’s largest collection of paintings by Gustav Klimt. The Museum lives in
four iconic sites in Vienna – Upper and Lower Belvedere at the Belvedere Castle, the 21er Haus. Museum of
Contemporay Art and the Winterpalais. Besides the Belvedere Palace, Prince Eugene of Savoy (1663-1736),
head of the Habsburg armies in their Turkish wars, had built the Winterpalais for himself. In 2013, the lavish
stately residence located in Vienna’s city center opened its doors to the public after comprehensive
restoration and 300 years of being closed off. Today, the staterooms are an exhibition space for artistic
encounters between the baroque interior, the Belvedere’s collections and contemporary art.
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REGULAR INFORMATION
Exhibition Title
Sterling Ruby
Exhibition Duration
July 8 to October 16, 2016
Exhibition Venue
Winterpalais
Himmelpfortgasse 8, 1010 Vienna, Austria
Catalogue
Sterling Ruby
Editors: Agnes Husslein-Arco, Mario Codognato
Graphic Design: Grafisches Büro, Vienna
Print and Binding: Grasl FairPrint, Bad Vöslau
Pages: 112
220 x 320 mm, Hardcover
German & English in one edition
ISBN 978-3-903114-08-1
€ 29,-
Opening Hours
Daily 10 am to 6 pm
Entrance Fee
€ 9,-
Art Education
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€ 4,– (excl. entrance fee)
Duration: 1 hour
No registration required
+43 (0) 1 795 57-134
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Press Contact
Österreichische Galerie Belvedere
Press 21er Haus
+43 (0) 1 79 557-338
[email protected]
PR Contact Sterling Ruby
PR CONSULTING
Pierre Rougier
304 Hudson Street, 7th Floor
New York, NY 10013
+1 (212) 228-8181
+1 (212) 228-8787
[email protected]
Contact Studio Sterling Ruby
Sterling Ruby Studio
Tyler Britt, Director
4900 S Soto St
Vernon, CA 90058
+1 (323) 843 4005
[email protected]
Complimentary images can be downloaded for
media coverage of the exhibition at
www.belvedere.at/press
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