Sterling Ruby at Cycladic: Ceramics - Museum of Cycladic Art

THE EXHIBITION

The Museum of Cycladic Art has invited acclaimed American artist Sterling Ruby for an intervention in the Museum’s permanent collections, showcasing a selection of his famous ceramic sculptures.
The installation includes 21 ceramic works, some of those exhibited in the Dolly Goulandris wing.

It is the second instance, following the Ai Weiwei at Cycladic exhibition in 2016, that the Museum has invited an artist to juxtapose their work with its permanent collections. This time, Sterling Ruby, who continuously pushes the boundaries of artistic creation, places a selection of his works loaned to the Museum among the rare artifacts of its famous Cycladic Art Collection.

Ceramics have always been a crucial part of Sterling Ruby’s artistic career. The artist, who employs diverse material and aesthetic strategies across a range of mediums, including sculpture, drawing, collage, painting, and video, comes from a long tradition of California-based ceramic artists. The medium remains central to his practice, utilizing the spatial qualities of sculpting and the chromatics of painting.

The ceramic sculptures presented take a variety of forms, from smaller utilitarian objects, like mortars or ashtrays, to larger basin forms, as well as figurative, floral and totemic shapes. Ruby often combines, alters, and re-fires disused fragments from previous ceramic projects, catalyzing a cycle of reincarnation in which transitional moments and images are frozen in time. He positions the kiln as a site for ritual transformation, through which primordial and aleatory forces of nature work in tandem with his own hand in the formation of the finished art object.

THE ARTIST

Sterling Ruby’s work engages with issues related to autobiography, art history, and the violence and pressures within society. Employing diverse aesthetic strategies and mediums—including sculpture, drawing, collage, ceramics, painting, and video—he examines the tensions between fluidity and stasis, Expressionism and Minimalism, the abject and the pristine.

Born on Bitburg Air Base, Germany, to an American father and a Dutch mother, Ruby moved at a young age to the United States, where he grew up on a farm in southeastern Pennsylvania. There he encountered Amish quiltmaking and Pennsylvania redware pottery, both of which directly inspired his initial forays into garment-making, soft sculpture, and ceramics. Ruby graduated from the Pennsylvania College of Art and Design, Lancaster, in 1996. He received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2002, followed by an MFA from the ArtCenter College of Design, Pasadena, California, in 2005.

Public collections include the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; LACMA, Los Angeles; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; MMFA, Montreal; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; MCA, Chicago; MOCA, Los Angeles; MoMA, NY; SFMOMA, San Francisco; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY; Tate Modern, London; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Whitney Museum of American Art, NY.

Ruby has exhibited at institutions including the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (2020); Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (2019); Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas (2019); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2019, 2014); Museum of Arts and Design, New York (2018); Baltimore Museum of Art (2014); Des Moines Art Center (2018); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2017, 2012, 2011, 2008); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2016, 2014); Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, Paris, France (2015); Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2014, 2008); Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Ghent, Belgium (2013); Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rome, Italy (2013); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2013, 2009); FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Reims, France (2012); Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva, Switzerland (2012); Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm, Sweden (2012); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2012); Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, Tokyo (2011); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2008); Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2008); and The Drawing Center, New York (2008).

“Presented next to the artifacts exhibited in the Museum of Cycladic Art, the ceramics both explore the evolution of the medium and its possibilities and reflect on a modern notion of archaeology”

Sterling Ruby