Ruby Sky Stiler: Long Pose

Alexander Gray Associates, New York presents Ruby Sky Stiler: Long Pose, the artist’s first solo exhibition with the Gallery. The show features new paintings and a large-scale bas-relief mural that encircles the exhibition space. Together, these works expand Stiler’s exploration of art historical archetypes, as she recasts traditions of figuration and the nude through a contemporary lens. The exhibition’s title invokes the academic convention of life drawing from a posed model, highlighting Stiler’s ongoing dialogue with historical forms and techniques.

Stiler’s practice centers on the productive tension between abstraction and representation, and the interplay between flatness and dimensionality. Reworking Cubist fragmentation with classical and vernacular elements, she draws on her background in printmaking to create mosaic-like compositions assembled from hundreds of small, cropped drawings transferred into paint. The paintings on view are primarily rendered in shades of blue, with fractal-like geometries derived from subtle gradations that allow fine details to blend into harmonious compositions. The figures that emerge from these layered tapestries are clear yet precarious, as if on the verge of dissolving into pure form. As the artist explains, “They are almost falling apart into geometry—you take one thing away and they would be just shapes.”

This economy of form is evident in the exhibition's titular work Long Pose (2025), a bas-relief mural that unifies Stiler’s paintings within a linear architectural framework. Constructed from wood and painted in a warm earthen hue reminiscent of Pompeiian Red, it reflects Stiler's interest in the shifting nature of historical memory, as this ostensibly ancient color reveals as much about modern restoration as it does about Pompeii’s original palette. Long Pose's ruddy tone and sizeable proportions also recall monumental, weathered steel sculptures by artists like Richard Serra and Mark di Suvero—an imposing aesthetic that Stiler subtly resists. Though substantial in scope, Long Pose leaves the floor space navigable. Visually and materially, it remains light—sculpture, as the artist describes it, “that does not define your path; it does not push you around.” The abstracted, sinuous figures lining the walls are inspired by caryatids, the classical architectural form of female figures bearing structural weight. In Stiler’s hands, these forms move beyond gendered symbolism to become universal emblems of resilience.

Stiler's exploration of the politics of representation counts on a wide range of historical references, including Bauhaus architecture, Art Deco ornamentation, and the graphic patterns of Modernist designers such as Anni Albers and Alexander Girard. Alongside these allusions, her paintings incorporate intimate, diary-like drawings—her own spontaneous sketches, her children’s artwork, and imagery from popular children’s books. Drawing on Louise Nevelson’s collage ethos—defined by fragmentation, layering, and recontextualization—Stiler creates hand-assembled compositions that blur the lines between sculpture, collage, and installation.

Family and youth are recurrent themes throughout the exhibition. Stiler’s paintings offer expanded portrayals of kinship, depicting female-led social structures, solitary matriarchs, and father-child bonding. The patriarchal foundations of academic drawing and classical ideals of the male body are similarly addressed, while other works respond to these precedents from a distinctly feminist perspective, rejecting idealization in favor of novel ways of imagining the nude. With the exhibition Long Pose, Stiler invites viewers to reconsider familiar visual and cultural conventions—not as fixed symbols, but as evolving forms that bridge time and experience. By merging the personal with the historical, Stiler refines her distinctive visual language, creating a framework, as she notes, “where viewers can find connections and resonances that speak to our shared humanity.”

Stiler has been the subject multiple solo presentations, including New Patterns, The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY (2022); Group Relief, Fairfield University Art Museum, CT (2020); Fresco, Saint-Gaudens Memorial Park, Cornish, NH (2019); Ghost Versions, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT (2015); and Inherited and Borrowed Types, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, OR (2010), among others. Her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions including Friends & Lovers, FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY (2023); No Forms, Hill Art Foundation, New York, NY (2022); Classic Beauty: 21st-Century Artists on Ancient [Greek] Form, Providence College Galleries, RI (2018); The Times, FLAG Art Foundation, NY (2017); We Are What We Hide, Institute of Contemporary Art, Maine College of Art & Design, Portland, ME (2013); and the Socrates Sculpture Park Emerging Artist Fellowship Exhibition, Socrates Sculpture Park, Queens, NY (2010), among others. Her work is in the collections of Fairfield University Art Museum, CT; Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, ME; The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; and Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence, RI.