The only predictable thing for one Charles Ray indicate that it will be unpredictable. His sculptures, ranging from a life-size toy fire truck to a marble cube filled with Pepto-Bismol, are so varied that his trademark might be “expecting the unexpected.” The Chicago-born sculptor currently has two shows in his native Los Angeles. at Jeffrey Deitch through June 6 AND at Matthew Marks until June 13.
The first contains three older works, incl Fire truck (1993), a life-size toy truck made of aluminum and fiberglass. The second contains four pieces, including one he has been working on for more than 10 years, The fallen horse (2025), a life-size granite sculpture 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 really very different, too,” Ray tells the Observer, suggesting it’s better to walk the two miles between galleries. “I don’t think they’re schizophrenicly different, but for me it was interesting to see the time gap between Fire truck AND The fallen horse.”
Fire truck it is part of the Broad collection but, at just over 47 feet long, is rarely exhibited. After being in storage for years, it took some restoration to get it looking shiny and bright again for Deitch’s show. “I’ve always been very resistant to showing it indoors, but then when it first came up, I thought a lot about the day I did it, and the people who helped me make it, the deadline, and the sign painters who helped me with the keyboards.”
According to Ray, it’s both a toy becoming a real fire truck and a fire truck becoming a toy. “That was a big public sculpture embedded in the city in a really nice way because you might not notice it,” he says, referring to the time it sat on the curb in front of the Whitney Museum of American Art for the 1993 Biennial and left some wondering where the fire was.
Finding tires to fit the piece bothered him until one day, driving in the San Fernando Valley, he saw a sign for a tire shop with a massive tire. 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 aircraft.
Matthew Marks’ show includes a similarly derived work, Junk 2 (2026), a sculpture of car and engine parts painted in the bright colors of plastic toys. During a typical raid looking for items to use in his job, Ray came across a stack of cogs and brackets for a scrap collector. He liked it so much that he had the welder fix them together exactly as they were, then had some helpers paint them in the colors of their choice. The result is a set of candy-colored pieces that occupy the opposite end of the same spectrum as John Chamberlainabstract-expressionist sculpture derived from the automobiles of the 1970s.
Twenty years later Fire truckRay started The fallen horsenow on a plinth occupying the main room at Marks. While the approach seems straightforward, The fallen horse underwent multiple iterations. It began with photos and studies of a real prostrate horse, including one with a cowboy resting a reassuring hand on the animal’s neck, then one with 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 processed into foam fragments, which were assembled and covered with a layer of clay. At some point, Ray decided it should be made of granite, and so a 12-ton piece was struck from a quarry in Virginia, then broken in two, one becoming the horse and the other the plinth.
“I would use the wrong orientation for the alignment, without making the grain match. The granite grain would come together, but in a smooth way. With soft cuts, the horse comes out,” he explains, noting that it was machine-carved to a point before Ray carved the finer details by hand. “I’m thinking about details like the tail, how do you pull out the ponytail or the mane? Hair is really difficult. How do you make it go through? The only way I could figure out was to make it cartoony but realistic. As it starts to emerge, you see a materiality that you didn’t think about before.”
When the device changes its bit, it doesn’t fit exactly where it left off, resulting in drift—a kind of machine fingerprint that can be removed with extra passes, but doing so can sacrifice detail. Ray decided to keep some offsets in place, serving as a signature in a finished product that combines machine logic with human intervention.
Sitting next to Fire truck, Pepto-Bismol in a marble box (1988), the earliest work in both shows, presents what Ray calls a simple reversal—the nausea caused by the encounter with the cure. Made of marble infused with the famous pink antacid, which rests on its surface as a solid, the cube echoes the work of Larry Belland the juice is reminiscent of Noguchi’s Water stonebut more Ray’s own work from the 1980s, Paint boxa transparent cube filled with ink, and Paint linea flow of paint that appears to be a solid bond between the ceiling and the floor.
A few steps away it is TABLE (1990), a seemingly glass table on a steel frame that holds delicately carved decanters, decanters, glasses and bowls that appear to be Plexiglas. “The key to that work is space, all sculpture is about space,” he tells the Observer about a work he considers among his most complete works. The containers are actually fixed to the table, open at the top and bottom. “It allows space to flow through and around it. It is inseparable from its environment.”
Also in Marx, Pandora Animation (2026), whose pure white surfaces appear to be marble, but are painted in white bronze. This classic-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 mankind after Prometheus gave them fire by ordering Hephaestus to form the first woman from the earth, intended to torment the human race. In Ray’s sculpture, Hephaestus holds his hand over the girl who appears to be in a trance while Athena waits nearby to dress her in a silver dress. Here, the dress is missing and Pandora’s blank look echoes the lifeless mask of an automaton, referencing classics like the director Fritz Langhis masterpiece metropolis as well as composer Léo Delibes‘ ballet Coppel.
While it’s easy to think of the two shows as stand-ins in Ray’s career, they’re not. The earliest piece in Deitch’s repertoire was made a full 15 years after his most notable early work. Board part I-II (1973), in which he pinned the body to the wall with a plank of wood. “These exhibitions can be shown as two subgroups, separated by time,” he explains. “I hope that instead they form a single mereology—a continuous body of work that goes down through the decades, perhaps even going back much further, into something like Pandora’s animation.”
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