At Jeffrey Deitch and Matthew Marks, Charles Ray Is Still Full of Surprises

The only thing predictable about a Charles Ray show is that it will be unpredictable. His sculptures, ranging from a life-sized toy firetruck to a marble cube filled with Pepto-Bismol, are so varied that his trademark could be “expect the unexpected.” The Chicago-born sculptor currently has two shows in his hometown, Los Angeles, at Jeffrey Deitch through June 6 and at Matthew Marks through June 13.

The first features three older works, including Firetruck (1993), a life-sized toy truck made from aluminum and fiberglass. The second features four pieces, including one he worked on for over 10 years, Fallen Horse (2025), a granite sculpture of a life-sized horse lying on its side.

“There’s a lot of distance between the two shows and of course there are similarities, but then they’re really quite different, too,” Ray tells Observer, suggesting it’s best to walk the two miles between the galleries. “I don’t think that they’re schizophrenically different but for me it was interesting to see the temporal distance between Firetruck and Fallen Horse.”

Firetruck is part of the Broad collection but, at just over 47 feet long, it’s seldom exhibited. After being in storage for years, it took some restoration to get it looking shiny and bright again for the Deitch show. “I was always very resistant to showing it indoors, but then when it was brought in for the first time, I thought a lot about back in the day when I made it, and the people who helped me make it and the deadline and the sign painters who helped me with the decals.”

According to Ray, it’s both a toy becoming a real fire truck and a fire truck becoming a toy. “This was a big public sculpture embedded in the city in a really beautiful way because you might not notice it,” he says, referring to the time it sat at the curb in front of the Whitney Museum of American Art for the 1993 Biennial and left some wondering where the fire was.

Finding tires to fit the piece bedeviled him until one day, driving around in the San Fernando Valley, he saw a sign for a tire shop featuring a massive tire. He asked the owner how much it would cost and was told it wasn’t for sale. He offered $200 and walked out the door with what turned out to be a tire from the landing gear of a large wide-body jet.

The Matthew Marks show includes a similarly derived work, Junk 2 (2026), a sculpture of machine and engine parts painted in the bright colors of plastic toys. On a typical foray scavenging for items to use in his work, Ray came across a stack of cogs and brackets set out for a scrap collector. He liked it so much he asked the welder to fix them together exactly as they stood, then had some assistants paint them in the colors of their choosing. The result is an array of candy-colored pieces that occupy the opposite end of the same spectrum as John Chamberlain’s automobile-derived abstract-expressionist sculptures of the 1970s.

Twenty years after Firetruck, Ray embarked on Fallen Horse, now on a plinth that occupies the main room at Marks. While the approach seems straightforward, Fallen Horse underwent numerous iterations. It began with photos and studies of a real prostrate horse, including one with a cowboy resting a reassuring hand on the animal’s neck, then one with Ray himself replacing the cowboy, sitting in front of the horse, first nude, then clothed. A clay model was then scanned into a computer and machined in foam fragments, which were assembled and coated with a layer of clay. At one point, Ray decided it should be made in granite, and so a 12-ton piece was struck from a quarry in Virginia, then broken in two, with one half becoming the horse and the other the plinth.

“I would use improper orientation for alignment, without making the grain match up. The grain of the granite would come together but in a quiet way. With soft cuts, the horse emerges,” he explains, noting it was machine-carved to a point before Ray sculpted the finer details by hand. “I’m thinking about details like the tail, how do you extract the tailness or the maneness of the horse? Hair is really difficult. How do you just make it so you flow through it? The only way I could figure it out was to make it cartoon but realistic. As it starts to emerge, you see a materiality you haven’t thought about before.”

When the machine changes its bit, it doesn’t realign to exactly where it left off, resulting in offsets—a sort of machine fingerprint which can be removed with additional passes, but doing so might sacrifice detail. Ray opted to keep some offsets in place, serving as a signature on a finished product that combines machine logic with human intervention.

Sitting adjacent to Firetruck, Pepto-Bismol in a Marble Box (1988), the earliest work in either show, presents what Ray calls a simple inversion—nausea produced by confronting the cure. Made from marble filled with the famously pink antacid, which sits on its surface like a solid, the cube echoes the work of Larry Bell, and the liquid calls to mind Noguchi’s Water Stone, but more so Ray’s own work from the 1980s, Ink Box, a transparent cube filled with ink, and Ink Line, a stream of ink that appears to be a solid connection between ceiling and floor.

A few steps away is Table (1990), a seemingly glass table on a steel frame holding delicately carved pitchers, decanters, cups and bowls that, it turns out, are made of plexiglass. “The key to that work is space, all sculpture is about space,” he tells Observer about a piece he considers among his most complete works. The containers are actually fixed to the table, open on top and bottom. “It allows space to flow through and around it. It’s inseparable from its environment.”

Also at Marks, The Animation of Pandora (2026), whose clean white surfaces appear to be marble but are bronze painted white. This classical-looking trio of nude figures, a man and a woman with a girl between them, is based on the myth in which Zeus decided to punish mankind after Prometheus gave them fire by commanding Hephaestus to mold from earth the first woman, meant to torment the human race. In Ray’s sculpture, Hephaestus holds his hand over the girl who appears to be in a trancelike state as Athena waits nearby to clothe her in a silvery gown. Here, the gown is missing, and the blank look of Pandora echoes the lifeless mask of an automaton, referencing classics like filmmaker Fritz Lang’s masterpiece Metropolis as well as composer Léo Delibes’ ballet Coppélia.

While it’s easy to think of the two shows as bookends on Ray’s career, they’re not. The earliest piece in the Deitch show was made a full 15 years after his most notable early work, Plank Piece I-II (1973), in which he pinned his body to the wall with a wooden plank. “These exhibitions might appear as two subsets, divided by time,” he explains. “I hope instead they form a single mereology—a continuous body of work descending across decades, perhaps even reaching back much further, to something like the animation of Pandora.”

More exhibition reviews

• What’s Left to Learn from Marcel Duchamp?

• In Dancehall and Reggaetón’s Evolution, MCA Chicago Charts a Global Awakening

• Our Take On “Lucas Samaras – Sitting, Standing, Walking, Looking” at the Art Institute of Chicago

• Cy Twombly’s Drawing and Discovery

• Why You Should Catch “Bellezza e Bruttezza” at Bozar in Brussels