NOW—STERLING RUBY: Winterpalais, Vienna
October 13, 2016 Sterling Ruby’s first-ever European survey is on view at the Belvedere’s Winterpalais galleries in Vienna. The exhibition spans a decade of his work, including urethane and bronze sculptures, hallucinatory Color Field canvases, and handmade ceramics. The refined, solemn, and Baroque environment of the Winterpalais establishes a challenging contrast with Ruby’s historical motifs and urban demarcation. This juxtaposition aims to initiate dialogue between history and geography, past and present, European and American controversies, and ultimately to challenge viewers’ perception of contemporary life and its contradictions. In the following text, Mario Codognato, curator of the exhibition, discusses the installations and their interactions within the context of this museum. __________
In the famous The Art of War essay inspired by the teachings of the Chinese general Sun Tzu and presumably written in the fourth century BCE, battlegrounds are classified in nine types: scattered, easy, challenged, open, where major roads cross, dangerous, difficult, closed off, or hopeless. The terrain of art appears to embody all of these at the same time. An exhibition that takes shape and develops in the Winterpalais in Vienna inevitably brings to mind the historical and political figure who commissioned the building, Prince Eugene of Savoy, who at the end of the seventeenth century was one of the most important and influential military figures of his time and arguably in the history of modern Europe. The spirit, representation, and iconology of his military feats, and therefore of his influence on the geopolitical structure of his time, permeate the adjoining rooms of the Winterpalais. Very often the dynamics and strategies for visibility of cultural avant-garde movements in general, and of contemporary art in particular, have been associated metaphorically, and at times almost paradoxically, with military ones, as if the work of art and its message were to take military action in occupying a territory, the same territory defined by the surface of the work and the broader and intangible territory of its action and influence in society. This dynamic is even more apparent and its metaphor even more evident in and applicable to Sterling Ruby’s oeuvre. READ MORE...
