Sterling Ruby “Atropa” at Sprüth Magers New York

American artist Sterling Ruby has long engaged not only with the critical nature of our human condition but also, more broadly, with that primordial chaos from which everything emerges. His work deals with entropy, expressed both in physical and biological decay and in social, psychological and institutional conditions. Ruby has always embraced abrasion, erosion and chance in her art-making, allowing images and forms to emerge through processes that follow or evoke the nature of the object itself.

This fundamental aspect of his work is particularly evident in “Atropa,” his recent exhibition at Sprüth Magers in New York, which presents a new body of work created by his ongoing engagement with transformation, fragility and dissolution. Drawing its title from Atropos, the Greek Fate that cuts the chain of life, this exhibition puts vegetable life at the center, showing the paradoxes that accompany it. Plants exist in a state of flux: fragile yet robust, parasitic yet reproductive and often lethal yet medicinally valuable. Their existence comes from the intersection of destruction and restoration, at least from a human point of view, which reveals the inseparability of decay and renewal.

“The idea of ​​entropy is a good way to describe what I’m trying to do with the work,” Ruby told the Observer shortly after the exhibition opened. “I keep trying to create that middle ground: I want art to represent that tension between speech and oppression, law and lawlessness, truth and fiction, and industry and nature.”

It is within this liminal space, between man and nature, building and falling, that Ruby finds her habit. For him, the most productive space is not stability but instability: an indefinable space where collapse becomes inevitable and transformation begins. His new body of work embodies an even more fluid sense of matter, shaped by forces and forces that are always subtle. The works on paper, which include graphite drawings, pen and ink touches and vibrant watercolor collages, depict flowers in various states of appearance and finish. They feel at once soft and raw, like traces of a direct and unmediated exchange between mind, hand and material that emerge equally through memory, imagination and embodied experience.

The origin of these works lies in the flower garden that Ruby began cultivating in her studio years ago. Enhancing plant life within industrial buildings has revealed the fragile and unlikely possibility of coexistence between the living and the built environment. He recalls: “As things grow, die and grow, it became something I always looked at when I was working. “It reminded me of the history of still life painting and memento mori – remember you must die …”

Located in Vernon, an industrial area outside the city of Los Angeles, Ruby’s studio exists in an area defined by heavy manufacturing and environmental pollution. “Yet here I am, with a garden that attracted bees, hummingbirds, birds, butterflies. Over time, it changed into an ecosystem, and with the addition of water and food sources, even coyotes and hawks began to appear. “It feels like the studio is a place of change, not only for me as an artist, but for all these other living things. It’s inspiring to think of it as a place to live.”

Although her works on paper are mainly drawn from memory, Ruby often includes photographic texts in her collages, as well as dried flowers that she examines or translates into cyanotypes, interacting directly with natural processes and allowing the subject itself to participate in the making of the images. In DIFFERENCE (2025), the fluid distortion of these monochromatic collaged natural images reveals an endless cycle of natural transformation, the continuous transformation of new regions as part of an essential and necessary process. Flowers and the vitality of plant life are raised in soft watercolors, where the spots unfold into blooming fields of energy, like branches emerging from winter dormancy to revive the landscape.

The bronze figures represent perhaps the most beautiful tone of this investigation. Housed within a nearby townhouse building, they appear less as monuments than as spectral relics, ghostly remains that silently evoke death and infinity. Each one is from a live flower grown in his studio garden, cut, dried and cast directly into copper in a borderline alchemical process. The combustion stage burns away all living matter, leaving behind what Ruby describes as “the ghost of the original copper.” In this transition, from living image to ash to permanent metal, the subject is not eliminated but transformed into another order of existence. “Brass flowers feel very delicate and green to me; it’s like a cremation process.” Geometric bars, gates and funnels act as channels through which the molten copper enters the flower, entering its structure before solidification. “What I am left with, if the characters survive and the details remain true, is this living and fragile thing, like a monument held by an armature.”

While Ruby’s practice initially extended to a broader critique of institutions and society, addressing the structural violence, segregation and organized “evil” embedded in American life, “Atropa” feels more intimate. It is a profound meditation on his position as a time-bound, earth-bound entity existing in the midst of great cycles of conception, decay and transformation.

After more than 20 years of making art, Ruby’s relationship with her work has changed. “Everything likes to be on a high level now,” he said, thinking about how quiet and unassuming his practice had become. “The idea of ​​truth – whether it is constitutional, scientific or data-driven – has ceased to be a stable symbol where basic rights and sovereignty are preserved. In the past, I needed to expose the evils of America at work to reveal the oppression, division and violence that this country hides. But now I can not think about what I hate every day.”

Instead, he wants to create a work that responds to the current situation without being didactic: “I want my work to respond to the world, to the human condition, to set a time for itself, without explaining the meaning. Yet he is still convinced that art still offers something different from the political discourse, a different kind of truth, that works with metaphor, emotion and situation. “That’s my problem,” he said. “What does that look like? How do I make something sincere, abstract, or almost spiritual that captures the times we live in?”

More show updates