Sterling Ruby (American/Dutch, b. 1972, Bitburg, Germany) is known for his restless invention and prolific output across mediums. From handworked ceramics and sublime abstract paintings, to soft sculptures and work with textiles and quilts, Ruby is one of the leading voices of his generation. This catalogue presents twenty years of the artist's iconic, multidisciplinary works. Accompanying Ruby's first U.S. museum survey, this book takes a thematic approach to the artist's output, focusing on his critical invocation of imagery related to American identity. Beginning with his earliest two-dimensional works on paper, this volume demonstrates Ruby's distinctive approach to psychological, cultural, and topical concerns, and his continuous engagement with themes such as prison reform, labor conditions, and popular culture.

The multitude of mediums and techniques used by Sterling Ruby (born 1972) 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, 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 in which 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. This is the second edition of JRPRingier's 2009 monograph on Ruby.

Conceived and designed by Sterling Ruby (born 1972) himself, Softwork is generously illustrated with dozens of full-page photographs of works from the artist's last four exhibitions, as well as many images from Ruby's studio that provide insight into the artist's working methods. Ruby makes urethane and bronze sculptures, hallucinatory color-field canvases and handmade ceramics, addressing the conflict between individual desire and social structure, and the influence of institutional architecture, both literal and figurative, on human behavior and psychology. "'Soft Work' is only a didactic term. It's not hard, it's not solid, it's malleable," Ruby told ArtInfo. "In America, there is a domesticity that is not associated with masculinity--or if it is, it's usually associated with a difference, a contradiction." Some of the works in Softwork also point to the influence of the late Mike Kelley, to whom Ruby was both studio assistant and close friend.

Following the great artist book tradition of John Baldessari and Edward Ruscha, the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art has called on Matthew Monahan along with L.A. artists Kathryn Andrews, Aaron Curry, Alex Israel, Sterling Ruby, Ryan Trecartin and Kaari Upson to make individual artist books for 'The Los Angeles Project' in Bejing. Struck by the eerie similarities of the two giant megalopolises of Los Angeles and Beijing, Sterling Ruby takes the reader into his own journalistic vision - sourcing photographs of landscapes and interiors of Los Angeles and Beijing, both shot and found by the artist, each page is claustrophobically framed by collaged imagery of stalagmites and stalactites. The focal point where these two cities merge gives rise to a dystopic scene that feels like science fiction.

Edited by Lisa Mark. Text by Philipp Kaiser.

Alain Elkann has mastered the art of the interview. With a background in novels and journalism, and having published over twenty books translated across ten languages, he infuses his interviews with innovation, allowing them to flow freely and organically. Alain Elkann Interviews will provide an unprecedented window into the minds of some of the most well-known and -respected figures of the last twenty-five years.

CHRON is an approximately 500-page publication that collects over 300 collages and works on paper from a decade of Los Angeles-based artist Sterling Ruby's (born 1972) practice. Vivid backgrounds and a variety of media compose the intricate, geometric collages and reference the artist's painting and sculptural work. Ruby's DRFTRS and EXHM series are also collected here. The latter, massive pieces of cardboard originally used as a shell for the studio floor, are painted in deep hues of primary colors and exhibit the continued accrual of urethane and studio debris, a technique the artist continues to explore today. Proclaimed one of the most interesting artists to emerge in this century by New York Times art critic Roberta Smith, Ruby--with his graffiti-based spray paint drawings, nail-polish abstractions and inscribed Formica sculptures--has perfected a sort of anti-minimalism, here compiled in this massive new volume.