Ruth Root

Ruth Root's work combines geometry, color, pattern, and found imagery in compositions that resist easy classification and activate the viewer's gaze. Each piece begins as an irregular panel painted with acrylic and spray paint, suspended from a flexible, hand-sewn structure covered in fabrics the artist designs herself — producing large-scale works with constant visual tension that push against the boundaries of traditional painting. Rather than treating painting as a closed surface, Root approaches it as a dynamic field of layering, tension, and imbalance, drawing on media imagery, art history, and online sources to build complex visual systems that invite close looking and movement through the space.

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Ruth Root (b. American, active since the late 1990s) holds a BA in Art and Semiotics from Brown University (1990) and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1993), with further training at Skowhegan (1994) and Yaddo (2003). Her honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Mid-Atlantic Grant and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship (both 1996), and the Arts and Letters Purchase Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2015).

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She has had solo exhibitions at the Carnegie Museum of Art, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, 356 Mission, Andrew Kreps Gallery, Marta Cervera Gallery, Maureen Paley, and Galleria Franco Noero, among others, and her work has appeared in major group shows including Greater New York at PS1, Extreme Abstraction at Albright-Knox, and Surface/Depth at the Museum of Arts and Design. Her practice has been covered by Artforum, The New York Times, Art in America, and The New Yorker, and is held in the collections of the Whitney Museum, Hammer Museum, Hirshhorn Museum, LACMA, and the Carnegie Museum of Art, among others.