Conceived and designed by Sterling Ruby (born 1972) himself, Softwork is generously illustrated with dozens of full-page photographs of works from the artist's last four exhibitions, as well as many images from Ruby's studio that provide insight into the artist's working methods. Ruby makes urethane and bronze sculptures, hallucinatory color-field canvases and handmade ceramics, addressing the conflict between individual desire and social structure, and the influence of institutional architecture, both literal and figurative, on human behavior and psychology. "'Soft Work' is only a didactic term. It's not hard, it's not solid, it's malleable," Ruby told ArtInfo. "In America, there is a domesticity that is not associated with masculinity—or if it is, it's usually associated with a difference, a contradiction." Some of the works in Softwork also point to the influence of the late Mike Kelley, to whom Ruby was both studio assistant and close friend.
Featured image, of Sterling Ruby's installation at Reims Frac Champagne-Ardenne, is reproduced fro Sterling Ruby: Softwork.
"Appearing in four distinct permutations between 2012 and 2013, Sterling Ruby’s traveling exhibition Soft Work consolidated a thread of his practice that until then had received little attention. If in the past the artist had frequently used the exhibition to map out antagonisms between different mediums (ceramics against sculpture, image against object, and so on), Soft Work instead isolated from among this complex set of concerns a single, as yet overlooked medium: stuffed objects. Soft Work was, effectively, an exhibition of pillows: hanging in agglomerations from the rafters, sprawled in piles on the floor, hunched in corners or arranged in neat rows on the wall, in grid-like quilts or tangled up like spilled entrails. If certain of Ruby’s other work has located him disruptively in one or another of modernist art’s dominant streams—hard-edged sculpture, color-field painting, the dribble and drip—Soft Work proposes a genealogy more eccentric and uncanny in nature: of the stuffed." Excerpt from Julian Myers-Szupinska's essay and installation shot from Ruby's installation at the Center of Contemporary Art Geneva, are reproduced from Sterling Ruby: Softwork, just released from Walther Koenig. continue to blog
FORMAT: Pbk, 11 x 15 in. / 160 pgs / illustrated throughout. LIST PRICE: U.S. $50.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $60 ISBN: 9783863355814 PUBLISHER: Koenig Books AVAILABLE: 10/31/2014 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: FLAT40 PUBLISHING STATUS: Out of print AVAILABILITY: Not available TERRITORY: NA LA ASIA AU/NZ AFR
Published by Koenig Books. Text by Julian Myers-Szupinska.
Conceived and designed by Sterling Ruby (born 1972) himself, Softwork is generously illustrated with dozens of full-page photographs of works from the artist's last four exhibitions, as well as many images from Ruby's studio that provide insight into the artist's working methods. Ruby makes urethane and bronze sculptures, hallucinatory color-field canvases and handmade ceramics, addressing the conflict between individual desire and social structure, and the influence of institutional architecture, both literal and figurative, on human behavior and psychology. "'Soft Work' is only a didactic term. It's not hard, it's not solid, it's malleable," Ruby told ArtInfo. "In America, there is a domesticity that is not associated with masculinity—or if it is, it's usually associated with a difference, a contradiction." Some of the works in Softwork also point to the influence of the late Mike Kelley, to whom Ruby was both studio assistant and close friend.
