STERLING RUBY: |

Gagosian is pleased to announce |, an exhibition of new paintings by Sterling Ruby from the TURBINE series (2021–).

November 14, 2024 – March 1, 2025

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.

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.”

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.