Sterling Ruby

Documenting Sterling Ruby's first exhibition with Gagosian Gallery, this catalog includes beautiful colored reproductions of the artist's newest suite of spray paintings, "VIVIDS, "electric color fields representing the artist's ruminations on the shifting, multihued Los Angeles skies that he encounters en route to his studio. Additional color photographs of Ruby's workspace, as well as installation shots of the aforementioned exhibit, appear throughout the book documenting the creative process. Accompanying it all is new text from art historian Eugene Wang that situates Ruby's work within the landscape of twenty-first-century art, while also acknowledging the debt it owes to such midcentury modernists as Barnett Newman and Andy Warhol. Wang deftly places Ruby's VIVIDS in their proper context, temporally, geographically, and sociopolitically.