Representing the sensual and austere, Ross Rudel’s Untitled #51 is a sculpture depicting a highly polished and smooth dark wood with plaster sphere. Rudel creates a piece that rather than using the wall as a backdrop, he instead focuses on using the pieces to hone in on the anatomy of the wall itself. Untitled #51 is another representation of his artistic philosophy— to focus on subtlety and embrace the metaphysical. By placing almost no emphasis on the object itself, Rudel instead animates the wall on which it is placed, creating an illusion of movement greater than what any physical object can provide.
Untitled #51 places emphasis on organic shape and abstraction, rejecting the rigid cubic norms of art that was the convention in the Minimalist Art Movement during the 1960s. Rebecca Morse, a writer for The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles likened Rudel’s work as a sensualist to that of “anthropomorphic, yet anatomically ambiguous” creating a piece that is strangely hyperreal with no distinct beginning nor end, lacking in origin yet grounded in the human experience.
Description written by Tyler Li, 2025