Artist Sterling Ruby: “I’m Trying to Make Something Spiritual”

“I first saw Stalker in the mid-1980s. I grew up in a very rural community, but I had a group of friends who all wanted something that we couldn’t really get where we lived. With film, that was a possibility. I’m in my fifties now. I keep trying to figure out what I’m doing as an artist and how to keep going. One of the things that I really love about [Andrei] Tarkovsky is that his main emphasis was to try and resurrect some kind of spirituality in a time that was not so easy. I’ve lived in Los Angeles for well over 20 years, and I’ve tried to figure out what this place is. I started to see the studio – which is in Vernon, right next to downtown Los Angeles – as a place of abstraction, a place where the urban, the rural, the industrial and the natural overlap with one another. We are in this strange zone. The work in [my new show] Atropa is about growing things in what some might see as an uninhabitable location, and trying to make something spiritual – or if not spiritual, at least sincere – out of this debris and remnants of oppression. I started growing a garden in the studio. Over the past couple of seasons, it’s gotten really big. That led me also to think about Stalker, this overgrown landscape of industrial remnants. As an artist, your studio is a place that allows you to put your faith in something. It’s where I come in to believe in something, in order to create.” 

Since the mid-2000s, the artist and designer Sterling Ruby has worked across sculpture, ceramics, textile, painting and video to understand and explore our chaotic existence. He creates this layered, media-spanning work out of his sprawling studio near downtown Los Angeles, which has, over the past few years, doubled as a lush, ever-expanding garden. His new show, Atropa at Sprüth Magers in New York, explores what it means to exist in a violent yet life-giving state. Graphite drawings depict flora in states of bloom and decay; expressive watercolour collages blend countercultural iconography with atmospheric painted landscapes; painstakingly made bronze sculptures, each encapsulating an individual flower from Ruby’s garden, represent ghosts of a fragile existence. The show is named after the poisonous nightshade Atropos, who appears in Greek mythology as the eldest of the three fates, the one who cuts the thread of life to bring death and acts as a symbol of the hero’s inevitable demise. It’s the latest rumination in Ruby’s lifelong survey of craft as art, and what it means to stay vulnerable in the harshest of environments. 

Atropa by Sterling Ruby is on show at Sprüth Magers in New York until 28 March 2026.