VENICE.- A new sculpture, HEX, by Sterling Ruby, has been installed on the façade of Palazzo Diedo, a historic palazzo in Venice’s Cannaregio district which will be the permanent home of the newly created Berggruen Arts & Culture following its restoration. The artwork marks the first phase of Ruby’s A Project in Four Acts.

Sterling Ruby’s relief sculpture HEX cuts across the façade of Palazzo Diedo, interrupting the classical architecture with a sense of precarity. Influenced by the spatial relations of Constructivism, the components balance on a vector, nodding to the prominence of assemblage in Ruby’s mobile and collage works. The title references “hex signs” — the geometric, hand-painted, star emblems appearing on the sides of Pennsylvanian Dutch barns starting in the early nineteenth century.

While some interpret these symbols as protection against the supernatural, most attribute these as abstract images of celestial order, representing an agricultural interest in the stars as an expression of the annual progression of the seasons. Ruby regularly encountered these signs growing up in rural Pennsylvania, drawing upon their primary color palettes and geometric configurations for this sculpture. Composed of objects including a rusted box truck frame and recycled steel pipes from Los Angeles, along with a beaming red circle and a bright yellow flag, HEX faces outwards as a similar sort of badge for the palazzo.

Decorative and distinct from the structure, it marks the start of the artist’s two-year installation, A Project in Four Acts, in which Ruby will respond to the building as it is restored, reflecting the stages of transformation akin to the cycles of the seasons.

Nicolas Berggruen is the Founder and Chairman of the Berggruen Institute and has spearheaded its growth, establishing its presence in Los Angeles, Beijing, and Venice. Focusing on great transformations in the human condition brought on by factors such as climate change, the restructuring of global economics and politics, and advances in science and technology, the Institute seeks to connect and develop ideas in the human sciences to the pursuit of practical improvements in governance across cultures, disciplines, and political boundaries.

Committed to visual arts and architecture, Nicolas Berggruen has newly established Berggruen Arts & Culture, a multifaceted initiative developing and presenting programs internationally. He has commissioned Herzog & de Meuron to design the hilltop scholars’ campus for Berggruen Institute in the Santa Monica Mountains of Los Angeles, has acquired and is renovating Casa dei Tre Oci in Venice as the European base of Berggruen Institute, and has acquired and is renovating the Palazzo Diedo in Venice as a base for Berggruen Arts & Culture. He has helped expand the autonomy of Museum Berggruen in Berlin as a component of the Nationalgalerie and has encouraged the creation of new work by contemporary artists including Anika Yi, Ian Cheng, Rob Reynolds, Nancy Baker Cahill, and Sterling Ruby at the Berggruen Institute. He has also collaborated on projects with renowned architects including David Adjaye and Shigeru Ban.

Nicolas Berggruen sits on the boards of the Museum Berggruen, Berlin, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He is a member of the International Councils for Tate, London; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Fondation Beyeler, Basel; and of the President’s International Council for The J. Paul Getty Trust, Los Angeles.

Mr. Berggruen is co-author with Nathan Gardels of Renovating Democracy: Governing in the Age of Globalization and Digital Capitalism (University of California Press) and Intelligent Governance for the 21st Century, a Financial Times Book of the Year, and is co-publisher of Noema Magazine.

Nicolas Berggruen is Chairman of Berggruen Holdings, the investment vehicle of the Nicolas Berggruen Charitable Trust.