Charles Ray @ Matthew Marks

The most influential sculptors in contemporary art aren't the formal purists of MoMA's recent exhibitions (Serra and Puryear), they're a coterie of LA-based humorists whose deadpan confrontations with mass culture are more Arrested Development than Quaker meeting. Like fellow Angelenos Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy, Charles Ray tackles the big themes of sex, death, and everything in between. His three new sculptures at Matthew Marks trace life from its origins to its apex. Chicken is tiny, a two-and-a-half-inch steel sculpture of a chicken egg with a protruding beak and claw. In the white-painted steel sculpture New Beetle, a soft-faced boy plays with a updated VW toy, while Father Figure is an enormous work of solid steel, an 18-ton replica of a man driving a tractor.

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