LA Statuette

Nancy Rubins Paul McCarthy Matt Johnson Cherkovski is pleased to present LA Statuette, a group exhibition of three intimately scaled sculptures by Nancy Rubins, Paul McCarthy, and Matt Johnson. Organized in partnership with Max Levai and The Ranch, the exhibition is conceived as a companion to LA Monumental, The Ranch's outdoor presentation of three monumental works by the same artists, which opened June 27 and remains on view in Montauk, NY through November 15. This marks Cherkovski's second exhibition since opening its doors in May. Each of the three works in LA Statuette holds a direct relationship to its towering counterpart on Long Island. Where Nancy Rubins's Friends of Pluto suspends full-sized boats in a gravity-defying arrangement at The Ranch, Study, a small bronze, echoes the larger sculpture's interplay of mass, line, scale, and balance at tabletop height, suggesting without reproducing its tensegrity-based structural system. Rubins directed the movements of a crane to place the full-scale aluminum boats on site at The Ranch; "What I love about these," she says of her bronze studies, "is I use my hand as if it's the crane. I'm building miniature forms that just barely touch the ground." Her process involves assembling plastic and wooden toy vessels into a composition held together with epoxy, then casting each object individually before welding it into place. Like its much larger cousin, Study's form rewards a walk around its perimeter, and seems to shift with every change in perspective. Paul McCarthy's WS, White Snow and Prince on Horseback (2ft, Bronze) is a compact work featuring two caped figures astride two horses, the foremost rider's head tipped back and merging with her companion's. Born from McCarthy's continuous exploration of the famous 19th-century German folk tale Schneewittchen (Snow White) and its modern interpretation in Disney's 1937 animated "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," the work engages the dark psychological and social undercurrents of the classic fable. Snow White and her Prince, totemic figures of perfect love and perfect proportions, are transformed through the same process of digital manipulation, duplication, and enlargement that produced Sisters, the nearly 20-foot-tall bronze on view at The Ranch. At two feet in height, this version acquires a preciousness closer to the commercially marketed, collectible Disney figurines upon which Sisters is based, their sweetness subverted by McCarthy's signature distortions. Matt Johnson's 11 Brick Reclining Figure with 1 bar and a Matisse book assembles polychromed wood facsimiles of red bricks and a length of construction rebar into a recumbent human form, cushioned by a 2006 monograph on Henri Matisse. Mixing the seemingly unrelated worlds of building and art historical scholarship, Johnson plays out latent linguistic and formal connections between book and brick. A big book is often referred to as a mattone, Italian for brick; standing in for a mattress is "Matisse: Figure, Color, Space," itself a hefty tome. Like Johnson's sixty-foot seated Meditating Figure at The Ranch, assembled from twelve decommissioned shipping containers, this much smaller sculpture deploys components of commerce and construction in poetic allusion to human consciousness, intellect, and humor. Nancy Rubins (b. 1952, Naples, Texas) lives and works in Topanga, California, where she has maintained her practice for more than four decades. Her work is represented in numerous public collections, including Paris Diderot University, Paris, France; Austrian Sculpture Park, Graz, Austria; the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Hammer Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art; the Buffalo AKG Art Museum; the Honolulu Museum of Art; and Landmarks at The University of Texas at Austin, among others. Paul McCarthy (b. 1945, Salt Lake City, Utah) lives and works in Los Angeles, California. His work is held in major public collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Tate, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among many others. Matt Johnson (b. 1978, New York, New York) lives and works in Malibu, California. His work is held in major public collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Pérez Art Museum Miami; the Astrup Fearley Museum of Art, Oslo; and Ekebergparken Sculpture Park, Oslo, among others. Special thanks to Max Levai, The Ranch, and Hauser & Wirth for their partnership and support in realizing this exhibition. The Ranch is an exhibition space in Montauk, New York, founded by Max Levai. LA Monumental, a group exhibition of three monumental sculptures by Nancy Rubins, Paul McCarthy, and Matt Johnson, opened on June 27 and will remain on view through November 15, 2026. Cherkovski is a contemporary art gallery launched in May 2026 in the South Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. The program had its start as a curatorial collaboration between artist Dani Tull and gallerist Jessica Gallucci. LA Statuette is its second exhibition.

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Brooklyn, NY