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.
Curated by Karsten Löckemann with Anna Reimnitz.
