The only thing that’s predictable about a Charles Ray show is that it won’t be predictable. His sculptures, from a life-sized toy firetruck to a marble cube filled with Pepto-Bismol, are so diverse that his trademark can be “expect the unexpected.” The Chicago-born sculptor currently has two exhibitions in his hometown, Los Angeles, At Jeffrey Deitch until June 6 and On Matthew Marks until June 13.
The first includes three ancient works, incl Fire truck (1993), a life-sized toy truck made of aluminum and fiberglass. The second includes four pieces, including one he worked on for more than 10 years. Fallen horse (2025), a life-sized granite statue of a horse lying on its side.
“There’s a lot of distance between the two shows, and of course there are similarities, but they’re also very different,” Ray tells the Observer, suggesting it’s best to walk two miles between the galleries. “I don’t think they’re dissociatively different, but for me it was interesting to see the temporal distance between them Fire truck and Fallen horse“.
Fire truck It is part of the Broad Collection, but at just over 47 feet tall, it is rarely displayed. After being stored for years, it took some restoration to make it look shiny and bright again for Ditch’s display. “I’ve always been very resistant to displaying it indoors, but when it was first brought out, I thought a lot about the day I made it, the people who helped me make it and the deadline and the sign artists who helped me put up the posters.”
According to Ray, the toy becomes a real fire truck and the fire truck becomes a toy. “This was a big public sculpture integrated into the city in a really beautiful way because you might not notice it,” he says, referring to the time he sat on the sidewalk in front of the Whitney Museum of American Art at the 1993 Biennial and left some wondering where the fire was.
Finding frames to fit the lot bewildered him until one day, while driving in the San Fernando Valley, he saw a sign for a frame store offering a huge frame. He asked the owner how much it would cost, and was told it was not 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 plane.
The Matthew Marks Show similarly includes a derivative work, Unwanted 2 (2026), a sculpture of machine and engine parts painted in the bright colors of plastic toys. On a typical trip to find items to use in his work, Ray came across a pile of gears and brackets intended for a scrap collector. He liked it so much that he had the welder screw them together exactly as they were, then had some helpers paint them in the colors of their choice. The result is a collection 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 later Fire truckRay proceeded to do so Fallen horsenow on a pedestal occupying the main room at Marx. While the approach seems straightforward, Fallen horse It underwent many iterations. It began with photographs and studies of a real prostrate horse, including an image of a cowboy placing a reassuring hand on the animal’s neck, and then an image of Ray himself standing in for the cowboy, sitting in front of the horse, first naked, then clothed. A clay model was then scanned into a computer and formed into foam parts, which were assembled and coated with a layer of clay. At some point, Ray decided it had to be made of granite, and so a 12-ton piece was struck from a quarry in Virginia, then broke in two, with one half becoming the horse and the other the base.
“I’ll use a loose guide for alignment, without making the grains match up. The granite grains will come together but in a quiet way. With soft cuts, the horse shows,” he explains, noting that it was somewhat machine-carved before Ray hand-carved the fine details. “I’m thinking about details like the tail, how do you extract or finesse a ponytail? Hair is really difficult. How do you make it flow through it? The only way I could figure out was to make it cartoonish but realistic. When it starts to come out, you see a materiality that you never thought of before.”
When a machine changes its bit, it is not realigned exactly where it left off, resulting in offsets – a kind of machine fingerprint that can be removed with additional passes, but doing so would sacrifice detail. Ray chose to keep some of the offsets in place, as a signature of a final product that combines machine logic and human intervention.
Sit next to Fire truck, Pepto Bismol in a marble box (1988), the first work in either show, offers what Ray calls a minor inversion—the nausea of encountering treatment. Made of marble infused with the famous pink antacid, which rests on its surface as a solid, the cube resembles the work of Larry Bell, and the liquid is reminiscent of Noguchi’s art. Water stoneBut more than that is Ray’s own work from the 1980s, Ink boxa transparent cube filled with ink, and Ink linea stream of ink that looks like a strong connection between the ceiling and the floor.
Just a few steps away table (1990), a seemingly glass table on a steel frame containing finely carved jugs, flasks, cups and bowls, which appear to be made of plexiglass. “The key to this work is space, and all the sculptures are about space,” he told the Observer of a piece he considers among his most complete works. The containers are actually mounted on the table, and open at the top and bottom. “It allows space to flow through and around it. It is inseparable from its environment.”
And in Marx as well Animation of Pandora (2026), whose clean white surfaces look like marble but are painted a bronze 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 humanity after Prometheus gave them fire by ordering Hephaestus to make from the earth the first woman, who was intended to torture the human race. In Ray’s sculpture, Hephaestus places his hand on the girl who appears to be in a state of ecstasy while Athena waits nearby to dress her in a silver dress. Here, the dress is missing, and the empty appearance of Pandora mirrors the lifeless mask of a robot, a nod to classics like director Fritz Lang’s masterpiece Metropolis As well as the ballets of composer Leo Delibes Coppelia.
While it’s easy to think of the two shows as the end of Ray’s career, they’re not. The first piece in Deitch’s show was produced 15 years after his most notable early works, Plank piece from first to second (1973) where he pinned his body to the wall with a wooden board. “These galleries may appear as two sub-collections, divided by time,” he explains. “I hope instead that they form a single abstract—a continuous body of work that extends across decades, and perhaps reaches much further back, into something like the Pandora cartoon.”
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