Sterling Ruby

 

Sterling Ruby’s exhibition at Hauser and Wirth’s cavernous downtown gallery was a stunning display of sculpture and painting that challenged viewers with aggressive scale, colors and textures. The most memorable pieces, like Big Yellow Mama (2013), announced themselves as though with a bullhorn. (All other works 2014, unless otherwise noted.) The 8-foot-tall, powder-coated aluminum sculpture depicts a geometrically simplified version of the electric chair used in Alabama from 1927 to 2002. (The original device was painted with yellow highway-line paint.) It has all the ironic, manufactured gloss of Pop—equal parts Warhol and Oldenburg. Ruby brilliantly renders the monstrous banal by remaking it in the oversize proportions and garish brightness of so much public art.

Oldenburg’s slopped and wobbly surfaces and his acute grasp of the innuendo and impotence embedded in mass culture’s fetish objects infused much of the exhibition. Ruby brings Oldenburg’s wry postwar Pop to its postindustrial conclusion: if Pop revealed weaknesses in America’s images of its own success, here Ruby shows that those images have long since collapsed. One reads despair in work like HANGING FIGURES, two huge elongated bodies—stuffed and lumpy like pantyhose dolls from a country fair—made from what look like stitched-together American flag Snuggies. Suspended from the rafters, their jointless arms are sewn together as they crumple on the floor in a torpid (or desperate) embrace.

Several sculptures reprise a technique found in Ruby’s “Monument Stalagmites” series. These earlier works were made by pouring bright red urethane, which hardens quickly, into long, gooey strings. In Pillars, four roughly 11-foot-tall columns are covered in that material. The capitals, dripping with what look like bloody icicles, are bored with holes that recall air scoops from 1970s muscle cars. The muscular motif was echoed in SCALE/BATS, BLOCKS, DROP (4837), a huge mobile comprising, among other things, engine blocks and baseball bats. 

The Cup was the exhibition’s visceral center—a gargantuan teacup, tilted and overflowing with red urethane, its drippings frozen in time. If Ruby intended specific allusions, they’re left undefined. Still, the blood associations were unavoidable: amid wars and school shootings, millennial America’s bloody cup runneth over.

The works’ rougher-hewn qualities and mix of low and high materials placed them as close to Arte Povera as to the Process art of Robert Morris and Lynda Benglis. The floor-bound Basin Theology/2C-T-XX (2013), made of brightly glazed ceramic, and two wall-hung examples from Ruby’s “Debt Basin Vertical” series, both bronze, bear the rude, anxious marks of an oversize clay ashtray modeled by a child. Inside these roundish forms lie sundry bits of industrial detritus: pipes, broken vessels, tools, hinged metal objects. Take the leftovers, the damaged and extraneous shards of your existence, they seem to say, and toss them in a bin. Call it a belief system or just the symbol of a life spent scraping by.   

On the walls, large two-dimensional pieces provided a backdrop for Ruby’s more impressive sculptures. The collage FLAG, over 14 by 28 feet, consists of patched-together pieces of fabric dyed in red, white and blue, intermixed with bleach-spotted swatches of black and brown. For his “SP272” series, Ruby spray-paints blurry fields of multi-chromatic horizontal bands onto canvas, invoking a graffiti-covered cityscape viewed from a speeding train.

Urban decay, American patchwork, the built-in failures of systems: these are longstanding themes in Ruby’s work, and to the extent that the wall pieces helped provide a kind of soundstage, they were functional. But most did not do much on their own, nor did they advance the most exciting, organic aspects of Ruby’s oeuvre.