Ruby Neri (b. 1970, San Francisco) draws upon 20th 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, Paul McCarthy, and Charles Ray, while her penchant for hand-driven craft connects her to the Bay Area Figurative and Funk movements. The ceramic vessels that have dominated Neri's production recently evoke both earthy tactility and psychological intimacy. Neri’s use of sprayed glazes 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.
Ruby Neri will be included in the group exhibition The Flames at the Musée d’Art moderne, Paris (2021). In 2018, she was the subject of a two-person exhibition, Alicia McCarthy and Ruby Neri / MATRIX 270 at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, California. Neri has had solo exhibitions at the Los Angeles Museum of Art in 2016 and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions in 2003. She has participated in group shows including 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, a collaboration with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Oakland Museum of California, Oakland (2014); Energy That is All Around: Mission School, Grey Art Gallery, New York University, New York (2014); Busted, High Line Commission, High Line Art, New York (2013); and Made in L.A. 2012, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2012). Her work is in the public collections of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Neri lives and works in Los Angeles.
Ruby Neri
Untitled (Dancing Women), 2018
ceramic with glaze
34 1/2 x 42 x 21 inches
(87.6 x 106.7 x 53.3 cm)
Ruby Neri
Untitled, 2018
pencil on paper
12 1/4 x 7 1/2 inches
(31.1 x 19.1 cm)
framed:
14 3/4 x 10 x 1 1/2 inches
(37.5 x 25.4 x 3.8 cm)
Ruby Neri
Women Playing with Dolls, 2017
ceramic with glaze
43 1/2 x 40 1/2 x 27 1/2 inches
(110.5 x 102.9 x 69.9 cm)
Ruby Neri
Untitled (Traditional Pot), 2017
ceramic with glaze
31 3/4 x 23 1/2 x 24 inches
(80.6 x 59.7 x 61 cm)
Ruby Neri
Smoking Woman, 2017
ceramic with glaze
35 x 31 x 26 inches
(88.9 x 78.7 x 66 cm)
Ruby Neri
Untitled, 2016
ceramic with glaze
65 x 35 x 24 inches
(165.1 x 88.9 x 61 cm)
Ruby Neri
Untitled, 2015
ceramic
26 x 31 x 14 inches
(66 x 78.7 x 35.6 cm)
Ruby Neri
Untitled ceramic sculptures, 2009-2010
Installation view, Art Los Angeles Contemporary 2014
Ruby Neri
Untitled (table with sun disc), 2013
ceramic, plaster, wood, glaze and paint
82 x 74 x 24 inches
(208.3 x 188 x 61 cm)
Ruby Neri
Untitled (head), 2012
ceramic and paint
30 x 17.5 x 14 1/2 inches
(76.2 x 44.5 x 36.8 cm)
Ruby Neri
Girl, 2010
plaster with ink and oil paint
44 x 21 x 41 inches
(111.8 x 53.3 x 104.1 cm)
Ruby Neri
Untitled (People with Horses), 2010
oil on panel
72 x 60 x 1 1/2 inches
(182.9 x 152.4 x 3.8 cm)