The only thing predictable about a Charles Ray show is that it will be unpredictable. His sculptures, which range from a life-size toy firetruck to a marble cube filled with Pepto-Bismol, are so varied that his trademark “expect the unexpected.” The Chicago-born sculptor currently has two exhibitions in his hometown, Los Angeles, at Jeffrey Deitch until June 6 and Matthew Marks until June 13.
The first consists of three old works, including Fire truck (1993), a life-size toy truck made of aluminum and fiberglass. The second consists of four pieces, including one that he worked on for over 10 years, The Fallen Horse (2025), a granite figure of a life-size horse lying on its side.
“There's a long distance between the two shows and there are similarities, but they're really different, too,” Ray tells the Observer, suggesting it's better to walk the two miles between the galleries. “I don't think they are different mentally, but for me it was nice to see a temporary distance between them Fire truck again The Fallen Horse.”
Fire truck it is part of a wider collection but, at just over 47 meters tall, it is rarely shown. After being stored for years, it took some restoration to make it look shiny and bright again in the Deitch range. “I always resisted showing it indoors, but when it was first brought in, I thought a lot about the days I made it, the people who helped me present it and the deadline and the sign painters who helped me with the decals.
According to Ray, both the toy becomes a real fire truck and the fire truck becomes a toy. “This was a great image of a community embedded in the city in a really good way because you might not notice it,” he said, referring to the time it sat on the curb in front of the Whitney Museum of American Art's 1993 Biennial and left others wondering where the fire was.
Finding piece-size tires puzzled him until one day, while driving in the San Fernando Valley, he saw a sign for a tire shop with a large tire. He asked the owner how much it would cost and was told that it was not for sale. He handed over $200 and walked out the door with a tire from the landing gear of a large wide-body airplane.
Matthew Marks' exhibition includes similar work based on, Garbage 2 (2026), a mechanical sculpture and engine parts painted in the bright colors of plastic toys. On a routine search for materials to use in his work, Ray came across a large collection of cogs and brackets reserved for the coin collector. He liked it so much that he asked the welder to fix them together as they are, and then have assistants paint them in the colors they like. The result is an array of candy-colored pieces that occupy the same end of the spectrum as John Chamberlain's automobile-derived abstract-expressionist sculptures of the 1970s.
After twenty years Fire truckRay entered The Fallen Horsenow on the terrace living in the big room at Marks. Although the path seems straightforward, The Fallen Horse repeated many times. It started with pictures and studies of a real bucking horse, including one with a cowboy putting a reassuring hand on the animal's neck, then Ray himself taking the position of cowboy, sitting in front of the horse, first naked, then clothed. The clay model was then scanned into a computer and made of foam pieces, which were assembled and covered with a layer of clay. At some point, Ray decided that it should be made of granite, so a 12-ton piece was struck at a quarry in Virginia, and it broke in two, one half into a horse and the other into a spine.
“I can use the wrong direction of direction, without making the grain match. The grains of granite came together but in a quiet way. With soft cuts, the horse appears,” he explained, noting that it was machine-carved to a point before Ray carved the fine details by hand. “I think about details like the tail, how do you get the tail out or the neatness of the horse? Hair is really difficult. How do you make it flow through it? The only way I could find was to make it cartoony but realistic. As it starts to unfold, you see physical things that you never thought about before.”
When a machine changes its bit, it doesn't quite understand where it left off, which leads to a reduction—a type of machine fingerprint that can be removed with more passes, but doing so may sacrifice detail. Ray chose to keep some of the offsets in place, which serve as a signature for the finished product that combines machine thinking with human intervention.
Staying close Fire truck, Pepto-Bismol in a Marble Box (1988), the first work in any show, presents what Ray calls simple reflexes—the nausea produced by exposure to an antidote. Made of marble infused with the famous pink antacid, which rests on it like a solid surface, the cube echoes the work of Larry Bell, and the liquid is reminiscent of Noguchi's. Water Stonebut mainly Ray's 1980s work, Ink boxa transparent cube full of ink, too Ink linethe flow of ink that seems to be a strong connection between the ceiling and the floor.
A few steps away The table (1990), a glass-like table in a metal frame that holds finely carved jars, decanters, cups and bowls that appear to be made of plexiglass. “The key to that work is crying, everything in the sculpture is about the place,” he tells the Observer about the piece he looked at among his complete works. The containers are actually attached to the table, opening up and down. “It allows space to flow within and around it. It is inseparable from its environment.”
And Marks, Pandora animation (2026), its pure white surfaces that look like marble but are painted in white copper. This ancient-looking figure of nude figures, a man and a woman with a girl between them, is based on a legend where Zeus decided to punish mankind after Prometheus gave them fire by ordering Hephaestus to create the first woman on earth, which was intended to plague the human race. In Ray's illustration, Hephaestus holds his hand over the girl who appears to be in a meditative state as Athena waits nearby to dress her in a silver robe. Here, the dress is absent, and Pandora's bare appearance proves the lifeless mask of the automaton, referencing the classics as the masterpiece of filmmaker Fritz Lang. The city and ballet by composer Léo Delibes Coppélia.
Although it's easy to think of these two programs as books of Ray's work, they are not. The first episode in Deitch's show was made a full 15 years after his most notable debut, Plank Piece II (1973), where he attached his body to the wall with a plank. “These shows can be seen as two parts, separated in time,” he explains. “I hope that instead they create a single mereology—an ongoing body of work that goes down through the decades, maybe even further back, to something like Pandora's animation.”
More show updates
