CURRENT EXHIBITION
Fay Ray
Mothers and Spiders
February 8 - March 8, 2025
Reception Sunday, February 8, 2-4pm
Fay Ray (b. 1978, Riverside, CA) lives and works in Los Angeles. She received her MFA from Columbia University and her BFA from Otis College of Art and Design. Ray has presented solo exhibitions at MOCA Tucson; Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles; Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles; Louis B. James Gallery, New York; JOAN, Los Angeles; Compound Long Beach; and The Soraya Art Gallery at California State University, Northridge. Her projects and installations have been presented at Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills and New York; REDCAT, Los Angeles; and L.A.N.D. (Los Angeles Nomadic Division). Selected group exhibitions include Palm Springs Art Museum; Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris; Gagosian Gallery, New York; El Museo del Barrio, New York; Praz-Delavallade, Los Angeles; and The Mistake Room, Los Angeles and Mexico City, among others. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Palm Springs Art Museum. Ray’s work has been reviewed in Artforum, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, New York Magazine, Wallpaper®, and The Brooklyn Rail.
Alto Beta is pleased to present Mothers and Spiders, an exhibition of recent sculptures by Fay Ray. The show features hand-sculpted porcelain figures of mothers and children with palm-sized, wall-mounted sterling silver spiders. The work examines care as a condition shaped by presence, gesture, and balance.
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Ray’s sculptural practice spans more than two decades and encompasses cast aluminum and industrial abstraction. In this exhibition, she extends her sustained engagement with the body, materiality, and spatial presence to the human figure. The porcelain works are intentionally restrained, featuring simplified limbs and pared-back surfaces that privilege gesture over literal representation.
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The work reflects a lineage of sculptural influences, from Michelangelo’s Pietà, through Rodin’s Large Seated Woman, to Degas’s Little Dancer Aged Fourteen. Ray first encountered these works as a teenager, leaving a lasting impression that informs her approach to form, proportion, and presence.
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The silver spiders inhabit the gallery’s edges, framing it as a site of observation and attentiveness. In dialogue with the porcelain figures, they expand Ray’s exploration of care from the central to the peripheral, the intimate to the architectural, the human to the abstract.
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This exhibition marks Ray’s first solo show in Los Angeles since 2021. Synthesizing twenty years of sculptural practice, Mothers and Spiders is tender, rigorous, playful, and devastating all at once, care as presence, as form, as material, and as memory.