Melanie Schiff & Sterling Ruby

Kavi Gupta Gallery Berlin is proud to present an exhibition of two video works, Melanie Schiff’s “Perfect Square” (2006) and Sterling Ruby’s “Dihedral” (2006).

Shot during a residency in Florida, Schiff’s “Perfect Square” (2006) uses marsh pools formerly explored by ecologist Jacques Cousteau as the setting for the artist’s elegant idea of swimming in a perfect square. Shot upwards from the bottom of the pool, the work is a rhythmic meditation on the relationship between nature and the basic shapes that are held ideally in the human mind.

In Sterling Ruby’s “Dihedral” (2006), plumes of liquid color slowly diffuse and absorb each other. A narrator with an ambiguous voice provides the work’s audio as he reads Roger Callois’ “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia”, a text originally published in 1935 in the Surrealist publication, Minotaure. The text references mimicry, camouflage, and metamorphosis – to discuss how an organism distinguishes itself physically and psychologically from its surroundings.

Melanie Schiff (b. 1977 in Chicago) lives and works in Los Angeles. In addition to her inclusion in 2008 Whitney Biennial, Schiff’s work has also been recently exhibited at the Museum Of Contemporary Art in Chicago, P.S.1 MOMA in New York, and Aspen Art Museum in Aspen, Colorado. Other group exhibitions include Shadows Don’t Cast Shadows at Meyer Riegger in Karlsruhe, Germany, Autonomy at Foxy Production in New York City, and Too Strong To Stop, Too Sweet To Lose at Cohan & Leslie in New York City. This past fall Schiff presented her third solo exhibition with Kavi Gupta Gallery in Chicago; it was entitled The Mirror.

Sterling Ruby (b. 1972 in Bitburg, Germany) lives and works in Los Angeles. Recent solo exhibitions include 2TRAPS, Pace Wildenstein Gallery, New York, Sterling Ruby/Robert Mapplethorpe, Xavier Hufkens, Brussels and The Masturbators, Foxy Production, New York. His recent group exhibitions include New Photography, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Beaufort 03, Art by the Sea, Ostend, Belgium, New York Minute, Depart Foundation, Macro Future Museum, Rome, Italy and the Moscow Biennial. In Germany, Sterling Ruby is represented by Sprüth Magers, Berlin.

Kavi Gupta