JANUS
Group Exhibition
Palazzo Diedo, Berggruen Arts & Culture, Venice
Opening April 19, 2024

In the spring of 2024, Berggruen Arts & Culture opens their new exhibition space at Palazzo Diedo, featuring site-specific commissions by eleven internationally acclaimed artists. The artists’ interventions have been conceived in response to the architecture and original features of the 18th-century building, once home to one of Venice’s most powerful families and formerly a primary school and court. The works are often inspired by traditional crafts associated with Venice, such as frescos, Murano glass, precious fabrics and Venetian floor design. The exhibition takes its name from Janus, the Roman god of beginnings, often seen with two faces, one looking forward and the other backwards, symbolic of the exhibition’s aims to bring the historical and contemporary together.

Day for Night: New American Realism
Group Exhibition
Gallerie Nazionali di Arte Antica, Palazzo Barberini, Venice
Through July 14, 2024

The exhibition features more than 150 works by American artists from the Tony and Elham Salamé collection, presented in collaboration with their Aïshti Foundation. It takes its title from a work featured in the Salamé collection by New York artist Lorna Simpson. Day for Night—in Italian, “Effetto notte”—is a cinematic effect that allows night scenes to be filmed in daylight. The title was also made famous by a 1973 film by François Truffaut, and in French, the day-for-night effect is called “La Nuit Américaine,” or “the American night.” This image is well-suited to the chiaroscuro visions of the artists included in Day for Night, who, in recent decades, have captured the reality of the United States in all its blinding complexity.

Mondi Possibili
Henni Alftan, John Baldessari, Cao Fei, Thomas Demand, Thea Djordjadze, Lucy Dodd, Robert Elfgen, Peter Fischli David Weiss, Sylvie Fleury, Jenny Holzer, Donald Judd, Karen Kilimnik, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, David Ostrowski, Michail Pirgelis, Sterling Ruby, Thomas Scheibitz, Andreas Schulze, Hyun-Sook Song, Robert Therrien, Rosemarie Trockel, Kaari Upson, Andrea Zittel
August 31–September 14, 2023
Seoul

Mondi Possibili highlights the interplay between art and design and explores the many ways in which experimentation with material, technique and scale can reveal the hidden narratives, quiet drama and humor in the everyday items that furnish our lives as well as our imaginations. Connected through a paradigm of the possible, all artworks on show examine familiar objects – citing, celebrating, adapting or appropriating them – offering surprising, playful or unsettling approaches that open up a range of “possible worlds.” This will be the fourth edition of Sprüth Magers’ Mondi Possibili – first titled by Pasquale Leccese – showcasing significant themes in the selected artists’ works as well as the gallery’s longstanding heritage. Its three previous iterations were presented in 1989, 2006 and 2007 in Cologne, where the gallery’s history is firmly rooted, and art and design have intersected for many decades.

Sterling Ruby
IN WARM SHROUD.

A FROST WINDOW.
April 29–June 25, 2022
Berlin

For the artist’s upcoming solo exhibition at Sprüth Magers, Sterling Ruby presents several new bodies of work installed throughout the Berlin gallery that interrelate along themes of verticality, duality, craft, domesticity, and shifts in scale. The exhibition premieres a suite of monumental wall-based works, connecting the artist’s longtime engagement with textiles and assemblage to motifs from his WIDW paintings, also on view. In the upstairs gallery, a selection of Ruby’s ceramic FLOWERS and REIF sculptures explore varying geometries—opening, collapsing and reconstituting anew.

GO FIGURE!?
Henni Alftan, John Baldessari, Cao Fei, George Condo, Diane Dal-Pra, Thomas Demand, Alex Foxton, Lenz Geerk, Elizabeth Glaessner, Matthew Angelo Harrison, Oscar yi Hou, Gary Hume, Clementine Keith-Roach, Karen Kilimnik, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Jo Messer, Pamela Rosenkranz, Sterling Ruby, Thomas Scheibitz, Cindy Sherman, Rosemarie Trockel, Kara Walker, Andro Wekua
May 19–May 26, 2021

GO FIGURE!? is an online exhibition in collaboration with Ed Tang and Jonathan Cheung. It presents works by artists from Sprüth Magers roster alongside a selection of emerging artists from around the globe and across various media, aiming to welcome a playful dialogue between the exhibiting artists and works.

Sterling Ruby
DAMNATION
February 13–March 23, 2019
Los Angeles

For the artist’s fifth solo exhibition with Sprüth Magers, the artist presents STATE, a single-channel video projection that features aerial views of the 35 adult state prisons of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. Ruby transforms the ground floor gallery into a giant black-box theater, immersing viewers within the artist’s ongoing investigations into the California prison system as both allegory and atrocity. Also on view is SKULLS, a new body of animalistic sculptural works that recall Hollywood special effects, Japanese Noh theater and, in the context of the exhibition’s title, Cerberus, the mythological multi-headed dog who guards the gates to the Underworld.

Sterling Ruby
THE JUNGLE
September 17–October 29, 2016
Berlin

For Sterling Ruby’s second solo exhibition at Sprüth Magers, Berlin, the artist presents works from his SCALES series of mobile sculptures, conceived for the first time as a single installation. Ruby’s output across a diverse range of media can be measured as a fine balance between chaos and order. Manifesting his coherent artistic vision in painting, sculpture, video, photography, ceramics, textiles and, more recently, clothing, Ruby embarks upon investigations into the material and intellectual fabric of contemporary society.

Sterling Ruby
WORK WEAR: Garment and Textile Archive 2008–2016
March 11–April 9, 2016
London

WORK WEAR: Garment and Textile Archive 2008–2016 presents for the very first time an eight year survey of the clothing and textile production made by Sterling Ruby. In 2008 the artist designed a basic “work wear” button-down shirt and a pair of jean-style pants to be worn in the studio. Over the years that pattern has seen an almost ritualistic retelling of the countless textile projects that his studio has overseen.

Sterling Ruby
I AM NOT FREE BECAUSE I CAN BE EXPLODED ANYTIME
April 8–May 28, 2011
Berlin

I AM NOT FREE BECAUSE I CAN BE EXPLODED ANYTIME features a large number of works including the artist’s paintings, collages, metal, bronze, ceramic, fiber, urethane and formica sculptures. A paranoid fantasy of an exhibition, it manifests itself in a series of works that incorporate the letters RWB not only within their titles, but also as a color scheme of red, white, and blue—the instantly recognizable colors that represent the flag of the United States of America. In using this acronym, the artist creates a powerful dissociative reverie: USA becomes RWB.

Rethinking Location
Rosa Barba, Cyprien Gaillard, Andreas Hofer, David Maljkovic, Trevor Paglen, Christodoulos Panayiotou, Sterling Ruby, Paul Sietsema, Taryn Simon, Armando Andrade Tudela, Andro Wekua
May 1–June 21, 2010
Berlin

Evolving from the work of twelve conceptual artists, filmmakers and photographers presenting alternate interpretations of fictional geographies, imaginary sites and "mash-up" destinations, the exhibition Rethinking Location reconsiders the notion of location. In an era characterized by a rapidly changing perception of time and space due to ever increasing mobility, migration and globalization, our understanding of what a location is has significantly transformed.

Sterling Ruby
SPECTRUM RIPPER
October 9–November 15, 2008
London

SPECTRUM RIPPER is the first UK solo exhibition of Los Angeles-based artist Sterling Ruby. Ruby speaks for a generation of artists who seek to re-inscribe the experience of physicality, sexuality and death into minimalist art. SPECTRUM RIPPER is the last of a three-part RIPPER trilogy, which began in September 2008 with ZEN RIPPER at Galleria Emi Fontana in Milan and GRID RIPPER at GAMeC in Bergamo.

Uneasy Angel / Imagine Los Angeles
Doug Aitken, John Baldessari, Patterson Beckwith, Lecia Dole-Recio, Jack Goldstein, Richard Hawkins, Patrick Hill, Sister Corita Kent, Norman M. Klein, Barbara Kruger, David Lamelas, John McCracken, Matthew Monahan, Lari Pittman, Sterling Ruby, Allen Ruppersberg, Lara Schnitger, Kim Schoenstadt, Paul Sietsema, Catherine Sullivan, Robert Therrien, Pae White
curated by Johannes Fricke Waldthausen
September 14–November 3, 2007
Munich

Uneasy Angel / Imagine Los Angeles is a thematic exhibition comprising the creative production of contemporary artists, writers, and filmmakers living and working in Los Angeles. In light of Umberto Eco’s and Jean Baudrillard’s notion of hyperreality, the exhibition perceives Los Angeles as just such a place—with unclear boundaries separating reality and the imaginary.