Chorus
Ruby Neri
MASSIMODECARLO is delighted to present Chorus, Ruby Neri’s debut solo exhibition with the gallery and her first in the UK. Chorus unfolds a surreal garden scene - part ritual, part dance, part escape. Neri’s sculptural works and accompanying drawings conjure a space that is both vividly alive and curiously introspective.
Neri’s compact compositions feature tightly choreographed figures, sculpted as if they were bouquets - female bodies twisting, melding, and blooming into floral arrangements. These works are celebratory yet cathartic, inviting us into an emotionally complex scenario that reflects the artist’s perspective as a woman in contemporary society.
Chorus carries a Shakespearean sensibility - an English garden reimagined through the lens of a playwright, where artifice and intimacy coexist. Neri’s ceramic sculptures form a “fence of girls,” a choreography of figures that simultaneously invite and guard. Defying traditional functionality, these vessels act as both barriers and gateways, their forms shielding fragile interior narratives. Each figure’s stance, glaze, and gesture evoke vulnerability, masked by a façade - an emotional sleight of hand that teeters between deflection and revelation.
Recent explorations in tonality reveal a shift in Neri’s palette. The sugary pop hues of past works are replaced by richer, deeper tones - organic, earthy, and psychologically complex. The layering of opaque and sprayed glazes creates a textured surface that both absorbs and reflects light, imbuing the works with a subtle, almost melancholic depth.
Alongside the sculptures, Neri’s pastels on paper extend the dialogue. Compact and heavily figurative, the drawings mirror the sculptures’ themes. While the soft, airy quality of the pastels contrasts with the solid ceramics, both share a dynamic, choreographed energy. Together, they map a psychological garden where figures and nature entwine, embodying the complexity of human moods, relationships, and everyday life.
Movement is a recurring motif throughout the show, embodied by symbols like horses and figures in motion - dancing, sitting, or pausing mid-gesture. These elements evoke a sense of perpetual flux, capturing moments of transition and thought. This dynamic also mirrors Neri’s creative process, where drawings and sculptures are developed simultaneously, each influencing the other.
In Chorus, Ruby Neri invites us into her cathartic garden dance, a space of escape and reflection. It is a world both vibrant and meditative, personal and universal. The figures, with their multifaceted personalities, reflect the inner dialogues we all experience - bold and assertive in one moment, introspective and retreating the next. Through this deeply introspective yet accessible body of work, Neri explores the challenges and beauty of everyday life, transforming the seemingly mundane into an emotional terrain.
Window - South Audley
Window - South Audley
The Artist
Ruby Neri (b. 1970, San Francisco) draws upon twentieth-century West Coast traditions as well as a global catalogue of art historical and anthropological modes.
She depicts the human body as a porous instrument of pleasure, terror, and everything in between; this places her within a lineage of recent Los Angeles-based artists that includes Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy, while her penchant for hand-driven craft connects her to the Bay Area Figurative and Funk movements.
Over the last 20 years, Neri has also been one of the leading figures in the return to ceramics as a contemporary artmaking medium. The vessels that have dominated her production during this period evoke both earthy tactility and psychological intimacy. Her use of sprayed glazes, meanwhile, links her ceramics to the street art she produced in the late 1990s as a member of what would become the San Francisco-based Mission School, connecting a contemporary urban art form with the archaic power of pre-historical wall-painting and object-making.
In 2018, Ruby Neri was the subject of a two-person exhibition, Alicia McCarthy and Ruby Neri / MATRIX 270, at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), California.
Recent group shows include Funk You Too!, Museum of Arts and Design (2023), New York; The Flames: The Age of Ceramics, Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris (2021–2022); New Time: Art and Feminisms in the 21st Century, BAMPFA, California (2021); The Domestic Plane: New Perspectives on Tabletop Art Objects, Objects Like Us, Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut (2018); From Funk to Punk, Left Coast Ceramics, Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York (2017); Fertile Ground: Art and Community in California, Oakland Museum of California and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2014); Energy That is All Around: Mission School, Grey Art Gallery, New York University, New York (2014); Busted, High Line, New York (2013); and Made in L.A. 2012, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2012).
Her work is in the permanent collections of The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Brooklyn Museum, New York; de Young museum, San Francisco; and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Neri lives and works in Los Angeles.