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Perched atop Le Corbusier’s iconic Cité Radieuse in Marseille, artist Sterling Ruby stages a powerful visual dialogue between modern art and modernist architecture. Inside MoMo, the contemporary art space founded by Ora Ïto, Ruby unveils his latest installation in a space already steeped in radical design history.
The centerpiece is DOUBLE CANDLE (2018), a towering bronze sculpture with a blue-green patina reminiscent of oxidized monuments like the Statue of Liberty. Standing at seven meters tall, the figures evoke solemn monumentality, hovering between the sacred and the surreal. Alongside it is WALL, Ruby’s largest spray painting to date, a riot of color and form that clashes—and converses—with the brutalist shell of Le Corbusier’s architectural prototype.
Built in 1952, Cité Radieuse was conceived as a utopian housing experiment, encapsulating Le Corbusier’s theories on urbanism and human-centered design. Ruby’s installation doesn’t just inhabit the space—it challenges it, riffing on the architect’s original color theory while asserting a chromatic urgency of its own.
In this unique meeting of post-war architectural ideology and 21st-century artistic expression, Ruby turns the rooftop of a modernist masterpiece into something both monumental and mutinous.
Photos: Sterling Ruby