CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 11/12/2014

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.