An abstract composition with predominantly red, black, and green colour fields. The surface shows varied textures, including brush and roller marks. In the upper left area, there is a small photographic element depicting mechanical details.
    Sammlung Goetz /Schaufenster

    Sterling Ruby

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    The American artist Sterling Ruby, who lives and works in Los Angeles, is known for his multi-disciplinary body of work, which includes sculptures, ceramics, bronzes, collages, textiles, and expansive spray-painted canvases in which he intertwines a wide variety of autobiographical, art historical, and sociological sources. Through deconstruction and reconstruction, Ruby explores the idea of a non-hierarchical and borderless universe. The exhibition at the Sammlung Goetz /Schaufenster lends insight into his multifaceted artistic practice through a selection of works created between 2008 and 2016.

     

    Ruby was born in 1972 on an American Air Force base in Bitburg, Germany to an American father and a Dutch mother. As a child, he developed a passion for drawing and was taught by his mother how to sew. In 1995, he visited a Bruce Nauman retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the show inspired him so deeply that he decided to become an artist. In 2002, he received his BA from the Art Institute of Chicago.  In 2003, he moved to Los Angeles to enroll in an MFA program at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, where, from 2003 to 2005, he also worked as a teaching assistant to Mike Kelley.

    Ruby experienced his artistic breakthrough in the mid-2000s. By then, he had already developed a highly diverse and multifaceted body of work, one that reflected both his experiences as a teenager among the Amish people in rural Pennsylvania and life in the metropolis of Los Angeles. Ruby stands in the tradition of modern and contemporary American art, with influences that include Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and Barnett Newman. Yet, he also incorporates street art, fashion, media, lifestyle, and current discourses into his work, making it extraordinarily contemporary and astonishing. 

    At the center of the Sammlung Goetz /Schaufenster exhibition are large-format spray paintings, which are among his best-known works. They combine gestural abstraction, graffiti, and atmospheric color fields with an industrial aesthetic, while also deliberately engaging with the history of postwar American painting. In addition to the spray paintings, works from Ruby’s other central series are also on display. These include DESIPRAMINE (THE CARDIAC) from 2011, a vessel-shaped ceramic from the Basin Theology series; early bronze sculptures, including the monumental three-meter-high work RWB DROPS from 2011; and Vampire 81 from 2012, a soft textile sculpture reminiscent of the gaping yet slackened mouth of a vampire. These works not only document Ruby’s enormous artistic range; they also represent further important milestones in his complete oeuvre

    Accompanying program

    /Schaufenster | rezeptfrei

    Architecture and Art in Dialogue

    Interim Uses in Munich’s City Center – Part 3

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    /Schaufenster

    Meet the Curator

    Chief curator Karsten Löckemann guides you through the exhibition "Sterling Ruby" in the Sammlung Goetz /Schaufenster.

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    to event calendar

    Current

    Laurie Simmons. Dollhouse Photographs

    – | Deutsches Theatermuseum

    The American artist Laurie Simmons is known for her photographs featuring tiny dolls representing stereotypical female roles in domestic interiors. The exhibition, a collaboration between Sammlung Goetz, Deutsches Theatermuseum and Filmfest Munich, presents a selection of works by Simmons that cast a critical gaze at gender stereotypes in the American middle class.

    Cyrill Lachauer. The Sunset Route

    – | Kunstpalais Erlangen

    feat. Mike Brodie, Mouse Green, Rhyw, Mia Justice Smith, Moritz Stumm

    In the exhibition The Sunset Route, on view at the Kunstpalais Erlangen and created in collaboration with the Sammlung Goetz, Cyrill Lachauer presents works from 2020 to 2025, a period during which he traveled on freight trains through the USA, Mexico, and Bosnia. In the spirit of poetic ethnography, he created photographs and films that are now being shown together for the first time. They all explore questions of freedom, self-determination, and resistance, as well as colonization, exclusion, and exploitation.