Ruby NeriIt's What's in the Ether
Artwork
Figures recline on the backs of horses, nestle into swans, merge with serpents in gestures that read as both consumption and embrace. A cat carries a naked woman as tenderly as a mother carries a child. They rest on clouds and exhale them, breathing out the same atmosphere that holds them. These are not the fabulous and frantic women of Ruby Neri's previous sculptures—those glazed ceramic figures tangled in wild-eyed intensity and the voltage of desire. Here, something softer has taken hold. It's What's in the Ether is what remains when everything burns.
After a year of profound loss—the fires that took her home and archive, her studio in transition, the deep dive into her father’s, artist Manuel Neri, estate—Neri has built her garden of Eden here. Naked figures wander among fantastical flora and fauna in a Hieronymus Bosch landscape drained of aggression, refilled with tenderness. Serpents support rather than tempt. Horses hold steady rather than bolt. Bodies are unencumbered by possessions or intent, held only by creatures who ask nothing in return. The work gathers everything into a single colorful and complete composition: animals, gardens, female bodies. There is urgency to this abundance, as if assembling all the elements might preserve something essential, might keep the puzzle whole when its pieces keep vanishing. The work is regenerative the way burning forests regenerate—ash, then new growth.
Neri works in her signature medium of hand-built ceramic, her surfaces activated with sprayed and painted glazes that link her practice to the street art of her youth. Four new paintings extend this vocabulary onto canvas—clay-built surfaces painted with the same graffiti-like urgency, depicting figures who act as witness. She shows off her skills as both sculptor and painter–the colors saturated yet primary; red, blue, yellow and green. Animals and figures merge and support one another across vessels and sculptures that refuse hierarchy between decoration and structure, between carrying and being carried.
What persists in It's What's in the Ether is not the house or the archive but the impulse to build, to gather, to create shelter in clay and glaze and wild imagination. The garden Neri has made offers a place to rest inside contradiction: loss and renewal, uncertainty and tenderness, the knowledge that we are suspended in forces we cannot control and the brief freedom of floating within them.
This marks Ruby Neri’s 4th solo exhibition with Salon 94.
Ruby Neri (b. 1970, San Francisco) draws upon West Coast traditions and a global catalogue of art historical modes to depict the human body as a site of pleasure, terror, and transformation. Over the last two decades, she has been a leading figure in contemporary ceramics, creating large-scale hand-built sculptures and vessels rendered in vibrant sprayed glazes that connect her practice to the street art she produced in the late 1990s as a member of the San Francisco-based Mission School.
Neri's work has been the subject of major solo exhibitions including Taking the Deep Dive, Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, UC Davis (2025); Staircase, David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles (2024); Paintings, Salon 94, New York (2024); and Wall Works, David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles (2022). She was also the subject of a two-person exhibition with Alicia McCarthy at Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (2018). Her work has been featured in significant group exhibitions including Bay Area Then, curated by Eungie Joo, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (2025-2026); 15x15: Independent 2010–2024, Independent New York (2024); Funk You Too! Humor and Irreverence in Ceramic Sculpture, Museum of Arts and Design, New York (2023); The Flames: The Age of Ceramics, Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris (2021-2022); New Time: Art and Feminisms in the 21st Century, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (2021); Energy That is All Around: Mission School, Grey Art Gallery, New York University (2014); Busted, High Line, New York (2013); and Made in L.A. 2012, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.
Her work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; Brooklyn Museum, New York; de Young Museum, San Francisco; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas, among others. Neri lives and works in Los Angeles.