Salon 94 is thrilled to present Ruby Neri, Paintings, an exhibition of new work by Los Angeles–based artist Ruby Neri. This is Neri’s third solo exhibition with the gallery and first exclusive exhibition of paintings in New York.
While studying at the San Francisco Art Institute between 1989 and 1994, Neri—alongside her contemporaries Barry McGee, Margaret Kilgallen, Alicia McCarthy, Rigo 23, and Chris Johanson—began experimenting with street art and graffiti. Later known as the Mission School, the group’s work covered the walls, tunnels, and construction sites of San Francisco’s lively Mission District. Neri, working under the pseudonym Reminisce, quickly became well known for her bold use of sprayed line and signature choice of subject: horses. In a recent interview with Teresa Eggers and Alicia McCarthy, Neri explains being drawn to the subject:
I grew up riding horses as well as drawing them since I was like 5, and because I was too shy to paint them at SFAI, when it came to choosing something to paint over and over again on the street, the idea of a horse came naturally to me. The street allowed a sense of freedom.
Neri’s graffitied horses were widely acclaimed and often left undisturbed by the city. Neri, in the same interview, says, “I remember getting rolled on by a cop, and they’d ask, ‘Oh, what are you painting?’ I’d be like ‘A horse.’ And they literally said, ‘Don’t forget to sign it.’ And then drove off. Crazy.” In 1996, Neri left the Bay Area to attend graduate school at the University of California, Los Angeles, and has since been best known for her brazen ceramic sculptures and wall works of fabulous and frantic women typically depicted naked or suggestively undressed.
In the four new paintings in this exhibition, Neri unfurls her signature vessels, reinterpreting her iconic in-the-round tableaux back into two dimensions: “It’s action, it’s movement; you’re moving all the time, it’s immediate.” Rendered in a colorful and bright palette of yellows, pinks, blues, and greens similar to her ceramics, these works offer a new dimension to Neri’s ongoing examination of the female form and feminine subjectivity as she directly engages with the weighty tradition and history of painting.
In both Love Match and Roads Well Traveled, Neri reinterprets equestrian portraiture through a feminist lens, replacing traditional male subjects with women—the free, pink, shameless, and high-heeled women of Neri’s world. Their presence in the works unsettles longstanding interpretations typically associated with the genre, hinging as they do on the figures’ emotional lives. In Found, two large figures—mothers standing shoulder-to-shoulder—come across a jubilant cast of small yellow figures that pop out of the ground like flowers. With large, upturned mouths, the pair happily wave to the others as they make their way across the colorful pink landscape.