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Ruby Neri
Untitled (People with Horses), 2010
oil on panel
72 x 60 x 3 inches
(182.9 x 152.4 x 7.6 cm)
3143 S. La Cienega Blvd, Unit A
Los Angeles, CA. 90016
T 310.558.3030
F 310.558.3060
www.davidkordanskygallery.com
info@davidkordanskygallery.com |
David Kordansky Gallery at the VIP Art Fair 2011
Presenting Ruby Neri
January 22 - 30, 2011
Please visit our booth online at www.vipartfair.com
David Kordansky Gallery is pleased to announce its participation in the VIP Art Fair with a solo presentation by Ruby Neri. The Fair will take place exclusively online for one week from January 22-30, 2011 at http://vipartfair.com. VIP passes that allow access to the fair are available. Please contact the gallery at info@davidkordanskygallery.com or 310.558.3030 for further information.
Born in the 1970s into the collegial environment of artists in San Francisco, Ruby Neri's initial influences were the painters and ceramicists closely associated with her father, the Bay Area Figurative sculptor, Manuel Neri. Her works have steadily built upon those early influences to reflect her interest in an increasingly wide variety of visual sources: American Folk Artists such as Edgar Tolson, early twentieth century German Expressionists such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and mid-century modern European sculptors such as Alberto Giacometti and Marino Marini. Accordingly, her paintings and sculptures are marked by a commitment to figurative forms that are modeled expressively by hand and animated by the application of unabashed colors, decorative patterning, and incised painted lines.
Neri's new paintings feature heavily impastoed surfaces that have been built up to create an intense sculptural presence, so that the spaces depicted in them are subordinate not only to color but to the physical materiality of the paint itself. Favoring figures depicted in profile or from frontal perspectives, the compositional strategies employed in these paintings seem to be drawn from ancient sources. However, Neri's is a living antiquity fully engaged with the archaic, even Dionysian origins of visual representation. Figures, most of them women (some of which are depicted with horses), are arranged in ritualistic groupings and threaten to dissolve into their environments. Materially speaking, their true environment is paint; in pictorial as well as physical terms they are directly formed from the very material that surrounds them, so that there is an emphasis on conflating the sculptural and pictorial functions of pigment and medium.
This literal blurring of the boundaries between foreground and background, and image and material, carries into Neri's three-dimensional work. Her new sculptures are covered with particularly expressive, gestural brushwork. The artist's hand can be seen in both the physical presence of the objects and the treatment of those objects as surfaces. In recent sculptures, Neri has begun to experiment with the formal attributes of the metal bases that support the figures. By incorporating painted metal and rebar as both decorative and structural elements, Neri transforms the basic material immediacy of these works into yet another realm for pictorial and painterly experimentation.
Just as the paintings operate on sculptural terms, the sculptures use painting as a way of referencing pictorial space and the visual and emotional associations put into play by color. They bring together the haunting presence of ancient sculpture with the mysticism of Blue Rider-era color theory. As such, their timelessness is borne of their connection to archetypal moments in the history of art, as well as the force with which they exist in the present moment.
Ruby Neri's work has been included in several important group exhibitions in recent years, including At Home/Not at Home: Works from the Collection of Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; Second Nature: The Valentine-Adelson Collection at the Hammer, UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Homunculi: Matt Greene, Allison Schulnik, Ruby Neri and Matthew Ronay, Canada, New York, NY; and Bitch is the New Black, curated by Emma Gray, Honor Fraser, Los Angeles, CA.
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