Ruby Neri
Salon 94 announces our first exhibition by artist Ruby Neri, with vibrant new sculptures and pastels on paper.
Neri鈥檚 ambitious large-scale ceramics pulsate with forceful femininity. Adorning oversized vessels or towering in fully sculpted form, the artist鈥檚 nude female figures are at once powerful and manic.
Where Neri鈥檚 earlier works revealed a keen alertness in the eyes, the six new figures carry a liveliness throughout their entire bodies. With their garnet red lips and bright lemon-yellow hair, the women in the exhibition border on the brink of fabulous and frantic.
Neri notes that rooms painted yellow yield a manic energy. Evoking clear reminders of enduring鈥攊f select鈥攃ultural ideals, the blonde hair of Neri鈥檚 women recalls associations of women on the brink of self-destruction: such touchstones for tragedy include Helen of Troy, the most beautiful, fair-haired woman of the ancient Mediterranean, and Marilyn Monroe. Through accumulation and repetition, Neri puts pressure on these tragic tropes until they reach new degrees of intensity and mania.
Doubly blonde and yellow, doubly hard and fragile, doubly sculpted in the round and on the surface, the works in the exhibition acknowledge ambivalence, confusion and delirium, stereotypical representations of the feminine that Neri refines through empowerment. These vessels depict 鈥渆xtreme characters of the imagination,鈥� as Neri describes, figures of multiplicity rather than portraits of any one individual. In Neri鈥檚 words, the sculptures have a 鈥渟elf-imploding pressure鈥攖hey are self-destructing in front of our eyes.
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Salon 94 announces our first exhibition by artist Ruby Neri, with vibrant new sculptures and pastels on paper.
Neri鈥檚 ambitious large-scale ceramics pulsate with forceful femininity. Adorning oversized vessels or towering in fully sculpted form, the artist鈥檚 nude female figures are at once powerful and manic.
Where Neri鈥檚 earlier works revealed a keen alertness in the eyes, the six new figures carry a liveliness throughout their entire bodies. With their garnet red lips and bright lemon-yellow hair, the women in the exhibition border on the brink of fabulous and frantic.
Neri notes that rooms painted yellow yield a manic energy. Evoking clear reminders of enduring鈥攊f select鈥攃ultural ideals, the blonde hair of Neri鈥檚 women recalls associations of women on the brink of self-destruction: such touchstones for tragedy include Helen of Troy, the most beautiful, fair-haired woman of the ancient Mediterranean, and Marilyn Monroe. Through accumulation and repetition, Neri puts pressure on these tragic tropes until they reach new degrees of intensity and mania.
Doubly blonde and yellow, doubly hard and fragile, doubly sculpted in the round and on the surface, the works in the exhibition acknowledge ambivalence, confusion and delirium, stereotypical representations of the feminine that Neri refines through empowerment. These vessels depict 鈥渆xtreme characters of the imagination,鈥� as Neri describes, figures of multiplicity rather than portraits of any one individual. In Neri鈥檚 words, the sculptures have a 鈥渟elf-imploding pressure鈥攖hey are self-destructing in front of our eyes.
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