Artist: Sterling Ruby

Gagosian presents |, an exhibition of new paintings by Sterling Ruby from the TURBINE series (2021–). The title, |, is an ode to verticality. This exhibition marks not only ten years since the artist’s debut with Gagosian, but also a return to the site of that inaugural presentation.

In a practice that spans painting, sculpture, drawing, collage, video, ceramics, and textiles, Ruby alludes to key artistic tendencies and to the intersection of sociopolitical histories with the narrative of his own life. Through formal juxtaposition, he interweaves the disruption of aesthetic convention with the reexamination of civil structures. In Ruby’s 2014 exhibition VIVIDS, large-scale spray paintings seemed to gaze into the horizon in apparent anticipation of changes to come. Those works’ horizontal orientation stands in stark contrast to the precariously balanced compositions of the new TURBINE paintings on view in Hong Kong.

Each work contains a central totemic form built from thin strips of cardboard encrusted with oil paint. These columns sit atop fields of equally thick paint spread across colored canvas. Formally and socially, verticality defines integrity. Historically a measurement of excellence, it is associated with progress, status, and respect. It is also, however, subject to collapse. For a person to collapse indicates exhaustion or illness, conditions alluded to in the titles of Ruby’s paintings Syncope and Keel (all works 2024). For a building to collapse indicates passage—of time, function, use, regime, or war.

Ruby recalls the sensation of witnessing such monumental collapse as a child: “When I was young my father worked as an explosives technician. On a number of occasions, I went with him and watched, in real life, the collapse of large structures, the thinness of architecture, chimneys and smokestacks crumble in one sweep, one motion. Transforming solids to particulates. Watching these smokestacks, built on twentieth-century labor and progress, fall, I cannot help but think of societies’ and civilizations’ collapse.”

While earlier TURBINE paintings convey a disruption of space and an interruption to the compositional integrity established by the WIDW series (2018–)—thereby reflecting a broader fracture felt in the 2020s—the new works focus on the precarious state of a central form confronted by an explosive action and teetering on the precipice of downfall. This is our present moment, echoing mass destruction and resultant change of a kind that the world has witnessed before, when they prompted the reactions of modernism and Constructivism. Such intervals often bring the significance of formalism back into question. The repetition of forms identified with Malevich, Brancusi, and others is not only an acknowledgement of the practice of capturing a changing essence, but also a recognition of our attempts to achieve, and of our inevitable fall. To work in series—as seen in such paintings as Collective Efficacy and The act of disagreeing—is to absorb the unrelenting nature of the world.