Sterling Ruby’s “Atropa” Is a Quiet But Profound Reflection on Entropy

American artist Sterling Ruby has long engaged not only with the chaotic condition of our human present but also, more broadly, with that primordial chaos from which everything originates. His work engages with entropy, expressed both through physical and organic decay and as a social, psychological and institutional condition. Ruby has consistently embraced abrasion, erosion and chance in his artmaking, allowing images and forms to emerge through processes that follow or evoke the organic evolution of matter itself.

This fundamental dimension of his practice is particularly evident in “Atropa,” his latest exhibition at Sprüth Magers in New York, which presents a new body of work shaped by his ongoing engagement with transformation, fragility and dissolution. Drawing its title from Atropos, the Greek Fate who cuts the thread of life, the show places vegetal life at its center, reflecting on the paradoxes it embodies. Plants exist in a state of constant tension: delicate yet resilient, parasitic yet generative and often lethally toxic yet medicinally valuable. Their existence unfolds at the convergence of destruction and restoration, at least from a human perspective, revealing the inseparability of decay and renewal.

“The idea of entropy is a good way to describe what I’m trying to do with the work,” Ruby told Observer shortly after the exhibition’s opening. “I keep attempting to construct that in-between space: I want the art to represent that tension between expression and repression, law and lawlessness, reality and fantasy, and of course the industrial and the natural.”

It is within this liminal terrain, between human and nature, construction and collapse, that Ruby locates his practice. For him, the most generative space is not stability but instability: the indefinable zone where collapse becomes inevitable and transformation begins. His new body of work embraces an even more fluid conception of matter, shaped by forces and energies that remain only partially visible. The works on paper, which span graphite drawings, pen-and-ink gestures and expressive watercolor collages, depict flora in various states of emergence and dissolution. They feel at once delicate and raw, like traces of a direct and unmediated exchange between mind, hand and material that arises equally from memory, imagination and embodied experience.

The origin of these works lies in a flower garden Ruby began cultivating in his studio years ago. Nurturing a space of botanical life within an industrial architecture exposed the fragile and improbable possibility of coexistence between organic and constructed environments.  “As things grew, died off and grew back again, it became something I observed constantly while working,” he recalled. “It reminded me of the history of symbolism in still life and of memento mori—remember you must die…”

Located in Vernon, an industrial zone outside downtown Los Angeles, Ruby’s studio exists in a landscape defined by heavy manufacturing and environmental contamination. “Yet here I am, with this garden that has attracted bees, hummingbirds, finches, butterflies,” he said. Over time, it evolved into an ecosystem, and with the addition of water and food sources, even coyotes and hawks began to appear. “It feels like the studio is a place of transformation, not only for me as an artist, but for all of these other living things. It is inspiring to think of it as a habitat.”

While his works on paper are largely drawn from memory, Ruby often incorporates photographic documentation into his collages, as well as dried flowers that he scans or translates into cyanotypes, collaborating directly with natural processes and allowing matter itself to participate in image-making. In SPLITTING (2025), the fluid distortion of these monochromatic collaged images of nature evokes the endless cycle of natural transformation, a continuous metamorphosis into new states as part of a vital and necessary process. Flowers and the vitality of vegetal life are suggested in delicate watercolors, where stains unfold into blooming fields of energy, like buds emerging from winter dormancy to renew the landscape.

The bronze sculptures represent perhaps the most lyrical articulation of this inquiry. Installed within the intimate domestic architecture of the townhouse, they appear less as monumental objects than as spectral residues, ghostly relics that quietly evoke mortality and impermanence. Each originates from a living flower cultivated in his studio garden, cut, dried and directly cast in bronze through a process that borders on the alchemical. The burnout stage incinerates the organic matter entirely, leaving behind what Ruby describes as “a bronze ghost of the original.” In this transformation, from living specimen to ash to enduring metal, the subject is not annihilated but transformed into another order of being. “The bronze flowers feel the most delicate and raw to me; it’s like the process of cremation.” The geometric bars, gates and funnels function as conduits through which molten bronze enters the flower, infiltrating its structure before solidifying. “What I’m left with, if the cast survives and the detail remains true, is this object that’s organic and fragile, like a memorial being held up by an armature.”

While earlier in his oeuvre Ruby’s practice extended toward broader institutional and societal critique, confronting the structural violence, alienation and systemic “ugliness” embedded in American life, “Atropa” feels more intimate. It is a deeper meditation on his own position as a time-bound, earth-bound entity existing within larger cycles of gestation, decay and transformation.

After more than 20 years of art-making, Ruby’s relationship to his work has changed. “Everything tends to be more elegiac now,” he said, reflecting on how his practice has become quieter and more introspective. “The notion of truth—whether constitutional, scientific or data-driven—has ceased to be a stable marker by which fundamental rights and sovereignty are upheld. In the past, I needed to project the ugliness of America onto the work to expose the oppression, alienation and violence that this country conceals. But now I can’t imagine what I would do to mirror the everyday distress and ongoing hatred that is so unmistakable.”

Instead, he seeks to create work that responds to the present condition without becoming didactic: “I want my work to respond to the world at large, to the human condition, to time itself, without prescribing meaning. I don’t believe these things are simple—they are complex and abstract.” Yet he remains convinced that art still offers something distinct from political discourse, a different kind of truth, one that operates through metaphor, sensation and form. “That’s my dilemma,” he said. “What does that look like? How do I make something sincere, abstract, or almost spiritual that can capture the time in which we are living?”

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