This issue is a key to enter the world of Los Angeles-based artist Sterling Ruby, exclusively playing the double role of subject and guest editor. Conceived as a viral, aggressive takeover of the magazine’s architecture, content and design, this hyper-vertical survey is the result of an intense dialogue with the artist and his studio, comprised of 160+ pages on his exuberant work and vision.
Ruby’s cover portra
Born in 1972 on an American air force base in Germany, raised in rural Pennsylvania, trained in Chicago, Ruby moved to LA to finish his education, became Mike Kelley’s teaching assistant and quickly one of the city’s quintessential artists. Now 44, he runs a megastudio with a staff of over twenty under the big black sun. Complex to label in his unapologetic combination of compulsion and strategy, bigness and poetry, handcraft and seriality, darkness and psychedelia, hard and soft, Ruby is one of the most unique and controversial voices on the art scene, working incessantly across the most diverse media and platforms and stretching the limits of visual language. This hybrid editorial experiment coincides with the artist's major show at the Belvedere/Winterpalais in Vienna and participation in the “Made in LA“ biennial at Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.
Running independent from the takeover, the opening section of HIGHLIGHTS and the closing section of REGULARS complete the issue with a rich and varied selection of the best of the summer season and insightful contributions from our columnists and correspondents around the globe.
HIGHLIGHTS features profiles on Sean Raspet (by Franklin Melendez), Kienholz (by Gianni Jetzer), Marguerite Humeau (by Nadim Samman), Eckhaus Latta (by Chloe Wilcox), Sol Calero (by George Vasey), Renaud Jerez (by Tina Kukielski), Christopher Y. Lew (by Julia Trotta), Yngve Holen (by Cristina Travaglini), Home Economics (by Attilia Fattori Franchini), Valerie Keane (by Allison Bulger), Cao Fei (by Xin Wang) and Megan Rooney (by Harry Burke).
In the REGULARS section, “Producers” features Carson Chan in conversation with New York-based collective DIS; in “Futura 89+,” Hans Ulrich Obrist and Simon Castets (with Katherine Dionysius) interview young Portuguese artist Bruno Zhu; Fiona Duncan reflects on the figure of the go-go dancer in contemporary art and culture as part of her “Pro/Creative” column; in “Renaissance Man,” Jeffrey Deitch discusses the collaboration between artist Alex Israel and writer Bret Easton Ellis; Maria Lind's “Centerstage” presents Danish artist Marie Kölbaek-Iversen; Gean Moreno unveils Cuba’s new normal for “Panorama”; in “Pioneers,” Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen talk to Heimo Zobernig; and lastly, as part of the “What's Next” series, we look forward to the season with collector and curator Tiffany Zabludowicz.
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