This issue is a key to enter the world of Los Angeles-based artist Sterling Ruby, exclusively playing the double role of subject and guest editor. Conceived as a viral, aggressive takeover of the magazine's architecture, content and design, this hyper-vertical survey is the result of an intense dialogue with the artist and his studio, comprised of 160+ pages on his exuberant work and vision.
Ruby's cover portrait is drawn from an extensive series shot by photographer Max Farago at the artist's massive industrial studio space in LA. Inside, the Sterling Ruby Takeover decodes the artist's grammar through an intimate conversation with artist
Piero Golia and newly commissioned writings by Alex Gartenfeld,
Donatien Grau, Aram Moshayedi, Ross Simonini, Paul Schimmel and Catherine Taft; while his network of influences is explored through a series of guest features dedicated to his peers, heroes and collaborators, including Huma Bhabha (by Massimiliano Gioni), Cassils (by Francesca Gavin), Mike Davis (by Sterling Ruby), John Divola (by Alexander Shulan),
Cyprien Gaillard (by Natalia Valencia Arango), Ron Nagle (by Sterling Ruby), Nancy Rubins (by Sterling Ruby),
Raf Simons (by Alessio Ascari) and Melanie Schiff (by Sarah Workneh). All of this content is punctuated by stunning visual contributions especially created by Ruby for the magazine's pages, comprising an unseen presentation of his Work Wear modeled by the entire studio team.
Born in 1972 on an American air force base in Germany, raised in rural Pennsylvania, trained in Chicago, Ruby moved to LA to finish his education, became
Mike Kelley's teaching assistant and quickly one of the city's quintessential artists. Now 44, he runs a megastudio with a staff of over twenty under the big black sun. Complex to label in his unapologetic combination of compulsion and strategy, bigness and poetry, handcraft and seriality, darkness and psychedelia, hard and soft, Ruby is one of the most unique and controversial voices on the art scene, working incessantly across the most diverse media and platforms and stretching the limits of visual language. This hybrid editorial experiment coincides with the artist's major show at the Belvedere/Winterpalais in Vienna and participation in the “Made in LA” biennial at Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.
Running independent from the takeover, the opening section of HIGHLIGHTS and the closing section of REGULARS complete the issue with a rich and varied selection of the best of the summer season and insightful contributions from our columnists and correspondents around the globe.
HIGHLIGHTS features profiles on Sean Raspet (by Franklin Melendez), Kienholz (by Gianni Jetzer),
Marguerite Humeau (by Nadim Samman), Eckhaus Latta (by Chloe Wilcox), Sol Calero (by George Vasey), Renaud Jerez (by Tina Kukielski), Christopher Y. Lew (by Julia Trotta), Yngve Holen (by Cristina Travaglini), Home Economics (by Attilia Fattori Franchini), Valerie Keane (by Allison Bulger),
Cao Fei (by Xin Wang) and Megan Rooney (by Harry Burke).
In the REGULARS section, “Producers” features Carson Chan in conversation with New York-based collective DIS; in “Futura 89+,”
Hans Ulrich Obrist and Simon Castets (with Katherine Dionysius) interview young Portuguese artist Bruno Zhu; Fiona Duncan reflects on the figure of the go-go dancer in contemporary art and culture as part of her “Pro/Creative” column; in “Renaissance Man,” Jeffrey Deitch discusses the collaboration between artist
Alex Israel and writer Bret Easton Ellis;
Maria Lind's “Centerstage” presents Danish artist Marie Kölbaek-Iversen; Gean Moreno unveils Cuba's new normal for “Panorama”; in “Pioneers,” Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen talk to
Heimo Zobernig; and lastly, as part of the “What's Next” series, we look forward to the season with collector and curator Tiffany Zabludowicz.
Published on the occasion of the artist's exhibitions at “Made in LA” biennial, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, from June 12 to August 28, 2016, and at Belvedere/Winterpalais, Vienna, from July 8 to October 16, 2016.
The multitude of media and techniques used by
Sterling Ruby (born 1972 in Bitburg, Germany, lives and works in Los Angeles) in his work—ranging from sculpture to collage, installation to painting, ceramics to video and printing—reflects the issues he tackles: the conflict between individual impulses and mechanisms of social control, the coercive function of architectonic space, art as the domain of irrationality, the sphere of dysfunctional behavior, Minimalism and Art Brut, Graffiti art, urban violence, desire, and pleasure.
His works combine memory of the past with attention to contemporary urban and popular phenomena. It is an art of expression and accumulation, of the overproduction of information and of the delirium of the senses, of neurosis and paranoia, and where the gigantism of the shapes and their proliferation appear like a corrupt manifestation of desire, consumption, anxiety, and the need for control that characterizes contemporary occidental culture.
Kaleidoscope magazine is an Milan-based international quarterly of contemporary art and culture, offering a timely guide to the present (but also to the past and possible futures) with an interdisciplinary and unconventional approach.
