Manuel and Ruby Neri Share Two Galleries and a Lifetime of Craft
At Andrew Kreps and Salon 94, the sculptor's first posthumous exhibition is curated by—and shown alongside—his ceramicist daughter
Manuel Neri spent four decades doing what postwar sculpture said he shouldn’t: making figures. While Abstract Expressionism raged through the 1950s and ’60s, the sculptor—raised in Sanger, California, by Mexican immigrant parents and shaped by the Bay Area’s medley of Beat poets and painters—carved, gouged, and painted plaster into life-sized human bodies. He directed the Six Gallery cooperative, where Allen Ginsberg first read Howl in 1955, and road-tripped between San Francisco and Mexico.
Now the subject of concurrent exhibitions at Andrew Kreps Gallery and Salon 94—his first posthumous exhibition, curated by his daughter, artist Ruby Neri—his sculpture is being seen as what it always was: singular and essential to the broader story of postwar American art. Ruby’s own exhibition, “It’s What’s in the Ether,” occupies the main upstairs room of Salon 94, mere steps away from the works her father left to her in his will. His plaster figures stand scarred and heavy on the gallery floor; her ceramic vessels carry floating women, reclining animals, and gardens that seem to grow in real time.
“There’s really no other sculptor like him,” says Andrew Kreps. At his downtown gallery, plaster works from the 1970s occupy the floor without pedestals—crouching, sitting, stretching—while drawings and early paintings from Manuel’s Window series punctuate the walls. The plasters were built through fastidious addition and subtraction: material packed onto armatures, then carved back, built up again, stripped away.
Every gouge and scrape remains visible. Slashes of blue and ochre operate less like paint than structural elements, holding volume together. Bronzes cast from the plaster originals retain every mark of the studio. Works on paper land with the same force as the sculpture, functioning as full-blown investigations of the figure. The whole space reads as a working studio left, a sensation also present uptown at Salon 94.
Integral to the exhibition is its function as a portrait of an artistic community. Pieces from the Mary Julia Klimenko series sit alongside a rare drawing of Joan Brown, Neri’s second wife and artistic collaborator. A poet, artist, and fixture of the Bay Area scene, Klimenko modeled for both Neri and Brown, their collaborations spanning decades. As Ruby sorted through her father’s estate, she recalled intimate impressions from her own childhood. When a paper portrait of Mary Julia—included in the uptown exhibition—surfaced, she immediately remembered a moment when her father and Brown worked side by side in the studio to draw Klimenko.
“My father had a rich world, and at times would allow us, his kids, glimpses of it,” Ruby has said. “His stories of being among the Beat poets, traveling in Mexico… his relationship with Joan Brown—how defiant they were of New York, how they created their own artistic voices, influenced by, yet entirely separate from the Ab/Ex scene. All of these stories sounded fantastical and wondrous to us—a life I came to naturally expect for myself as well.”
That expectation takes vivid form all over Ruby’s own exhibition. A former graffiti artist whose tag was the horse, Ruby came up through the San Francisco Mission School and—trading spray-paint for sprayed glazes—became a leading figure in contemporary ceramics.
Figures recline on horses, nestle into swans, and merge with serpents in gestures of both consumption and embrace. A cat carries a naked woman as tenderly as a parent lifting a sleeping child. Serpents support rather than tempt. Horses hold steady rather than bolt. The imagery conjures a Hieronymus Bosch landscape drained of aggression, refilled with care.
This shift has context: profound loss. Last year, as she began an emotional deep dive into her father’s estate, the Palisades fires destroyed Ruby’s home and archive. Yet, instead of admitting defeat, she sought renewal. Ruby found ash to be a salubrious fertilizer, planting regenerative flora all over her burned property and building her own Garden of Eden through her ceramics. The botanical imagery here is more pronounced than anything she’s done before: sunflowers, fantastical plants, growth that insists on itself. The centerpiece is a horse ceramic, her calling card coming full circle. Faces are a recurring theme as Ruby manifests her community, which remains her integral support system. Glazes run more matte than usual and colors more primary, affording the work a directness that matches its weight.
Zoe Fisher, director of Salon 94, described the title piece, a figure both smoking and being supported by smoke, as “trying to give a type of ephemeral feeling… of being a little bit in a transient space of letting go; you can’t let go, and also can’t hold on.”
Past the doors through Ruby’s show, Manuel’s 1980s works—produced at the height of his career—sit in a room of their own. Father and daughter share a building: one through process and regeneration. The house and the archive may be gone, but the impulse to build, gather, and make shelter out of clay and glaze and whatever is left after the fire remains.
“It’s What’s in the Ether” is on view at Salon 94 at 3 E 89th St, New York, NY. “Manuel Neri: Selected Works by Ruby Neri” is on view at Salon 94 and Andrew Kreps Gallery at 394 Broadway, New York, NY. Both shows are on through April 11th.