RUBY NERI: SLAVES AND HUMANS, text by Jenelle Porter

David Kordansky Gallery, 2017, First edition, 92 pp., 9 1/2" X 12", Hardcover

Fine

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Ruby Neri: Slaves and Humans, July 23-August 27, 2016, David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles

In the summer of 2016, the cleanly proportioned space of David Kordansky Gallery was invaded by an unruly horde of artworks that were raucous, excessive, ungainly, and defIantly fun. Slaves and Humans was a body of new work by the Los Angeles-based artist Ruby Neri unlike anything she had done before. Large pots, some over fIve feet high, were adorned with sprayed images of grinning, naked, yellow-haired women. Often the pots themselves were anthropomorphic, with contours that threw the paintings on their surfaces into three-dimensional relief. The works were unapologetically sexual, though not in the way that popular culture typically sexualizes nude, large-breasted women. It seemed as though Neri was co-opting misogynist depictions of femininity and making them her own. This new body of work had been brewing for years, but it felt like absolutely the right thing for its time and place.