Sterling Ruby
Anti-Print Poster (in three parts), 2007
Letterpress on paper
(1) 21 1/2 × 14 1/2 inches, (2) 23 1/2 × 17 1/2 inches, (3) 16 × 23 inches
Signed, numbered, dated recto
Edition of 30, 3 AP
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Courtesy of Foxy Productions
From the Foxy Production website about Superoverpass Exhibition from April 2007:
Superoverpass (2007) is a white geometric bridge-shaped sculptural work that fills the entire main space of the gallery: viewers are forced to walk under and through it. At first recalling a Robert Morris Minimalist sculpture, on closer inspection the work loses its perfectionist sheen and its claim to purity: its Formica surface is defaced and degraded with scratch graffiti and grime. Confounding expectations, it presents a Minimalist form contaminated by the collective expression of etched “tags,” and the stains of wear, tear, and time.
But rather than romanticizing the expressive, Ruby taps the collective anguish and emotion embedded within and regulated by systems of meaning and control. His Anti Prints (2007), a series of fluorescent Letterpress prints, read like protest signs gone awry. With perplexing phrases and images, they combine many of Ruby’s most powerful motifs: drips, kilns, and spray graffiti. In parts cryptic, raw, architectonic, sexual, and nebulous, they wryly attack Minimalism, geometry and architecture, proposing a self-styled “amorphous law.”