But the connection to cloth extends further back to his childhood in rural Pennsylvania, where Amish crafts like woodworking and quilting were prevalent. Ruby started piecing fabric scraps together into clothing as a teenager, armed with a sewing machine gifted from his mother.

The QUILTS embody warmth, touch and the handmade. Brightly colored skeins of tangled yarn, striped elastic bands designed by the artist, heat-pressed, collaged images and a variety of treated and patterned fabrics are sutured together in rectangular compositions, bisected horizontally and vertically. These fabric elements and techniques, many of which are appropriated from fashion and pattern-making, are reconfigured so as to reimagine new material possibilities in which the concepts of painting, tapestry and textile are entwined.

Installed in conversation with the QUILTS are two new examples of Ruby’s large-scale Basin Theology ceramics. To create them, the artist assembles pieces of ceramic detritus from past misfirings in his kiln—an uncontrolled environment in which a significant amount of objects explode and fail—and embeds them within a basin-like form. As Ruby has explained: “The Basins ultimately started to become the new vessel being filled in with all of the entrapments of the pieces that had blown up, and the failures of the past, reglazed, refired, reglazed, refired, until they become this archaeology of time.” Craft and chance are at odds in these richly evocative works, and their blend of dark glazes and metallic sheens offer additional contrasts and tension. 

A group of new WIDW. paintings (short for “window”), an ongoing series, feature deep-blue hues that shift to lush turquoise via gestural white highlights, intimating the movement of water across the canvas surface, caught between liquid and frozen.

As with all WIDW. works, painted cardboard columns divide the canvas in two, suggesting the panes of a window and the consequent polar notion of looking out or looking in. The paintings' tactility and everyday motifs generate a space of intimacy, domesticity and warmth, despite the icy tonalities. And their placement in a space with actual windows, moreover, creates a physical and metaphorical doubling that situates the viewer between pictorial surface and actual depth.

The angular shards of the REIF sculptures (an abbreviation of “relief”) similarly cut through the works' compositions, creating networks of shadow and depth across their bas-relief surfaces. Compiled of offcuts and discarded scraps from previous works that the artist amasses in his studio, REIFS convey Ruby’s impulse to reinvestigate materials.

A parallel type of excavation is performed into his personal history through the inclusion of wood pieces from his mother’s barn, which was disassembled after her death and shipped from New Freedom, Pennsylvania, to Los Angeles. The REIFS' scale give them an approachable quality, and the makeshift, hand-assembled components point to the ingredients of craft and transformation that run throughout Ruby's exhibition.

To address the current humanitarian crisis in Ukraine, Sterling Ruby has created the open edition WAS WAR WON, IN SOLIDARITY WITH UKRAINE to display in Sprüth Magers Window.

All proceeds will be donated to Be an Angel e.V., an organization working to
evacuate refugees from Ukraine.
 
The posters can be purchased at the gallery.