“Los Angeles isn’t a city. It’s a gigantic, sprawling, ongoing studio. Everything is off the record.”  —Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company

The Ranch is pleased to announce LA Monumental, a group exhibition featuring three  monumental sculptures realized through distinct materials, forms, and approaches to scale. For generations, artists have arrived in Los Angeles in search of space—space to work,  experiment, and breathe. Unlike the dense urban fabric of other art capitals, Los Angeles  offers expansive studios, industrial sites, and a landscape measured by horizons rather than  boundaries. From this environment emerged a tradition in which monumentality is more than  size alone; it is an artistic sensibility shaped by openness, ambition, and possibility. Nancy  Rubins, Paul McCarthy, and Matt Johnson embody this legacy and carry it forward. Unscared  by scale and the limits of fabrication, they demonstrate how a distinct brand of monumentality  belongs to Los Angeles art making.

The relationship between artists and scale extends beyond the work they produce  themselves. Perched at the edge of the Malibu hills, Matt Johnson's indoor-outdoor studio  complex opens onto seemingly endless vistas stretching toward the Pacific. In Los Angeles,  Paul McCarthy works within an environment shaped by decades of production, where  sculptures, props, and recurring characters from his imagined worlds coexist as part of an  ever-expanding artistic universe. In Topanga Canyon, Nancy Rubins navigates a hardscrabble  landscape, removed almost from this world, where rugged terrain, open sky, and shifting light  remain constant companions. The realities of their daily lives—the vistas they encounter each  day, the environments they inhabit, and the spaces they navigate—shape not only what they  make, but how they imagine what can be made.

Like so many who come to Los Angeles and never look back, Paul McCarthy arrived from Utah  to attend the University of Southern California and went on to help define a distinctly Los  Angeles artistic sensibility. Nancy Rubins left the constraints of the New York art world for the  openness of Southern California, where she and her late husband Chris Burden became  integral figures within the region's artistic and academic communities. Matt Johnson followed  a similar path, coming West to study at UCLA, where he encountered Rubins, Burden, and the  broader lineage of artists who helped shape contemporary Los Angeles art. Their influence  extended beyond the classroom, offering a model for how an artist might live and work in  Southern California—embracing space, experimentation, and ambition on a scale difficult to  imagine elsewhere. After establishing studios throughout Los Angeles, Johnson ultimately  built his own practice in Malibu, carrying forward a distinctly West Coast approach to art  making. Though their journeys span different generations, each found in Los Angeles not only  a place to work, but a place expansive enough to sustain a lifelong artistic practice.

Not so different from the generations who moved West in search of opportunity, freedom,  and open land, these artists have built practices defined by possibility. Set against  thousands of acres of protected reserve—just a few miles from the end of the world— their works enter into a dialogue with a landscape that refuses to be dominated. Montauk  provides these Angelenos with an East Coast equivalent of their lived reality: a place  where nature usually wins.

NANCY RUBINS - Friends of Pluto (2026)

Few artists have explored the possibilities of scale, balance, and spatial composition as  rigorously as Nancy Rubins. After completing her studies in Baltimore, Rubins moved West  to attend the University of California, Davis, beginning a lifelong engagement with the  physical and conceptual freedoms of the California landscape. For more than four  decades, she has transformed discarded industrial and recreational materials into  monumental sculptural installations that challenge conventional ideas of structure, gravity,  and form.

Created specifically for LA Monumental, Friends of Pluto (2026) consists of fifty-five  canoes, rowboats, and Jon boats suspended in a dynamic arrangement that appears to  defy gravity. Working simultaneously as sculptor, conductor, and draftsman, Rubins  composes in three dimensions, orchestrating mass, movement, line, and space into a work  that shifts with every vantage point. Like her drawings and collages, the sculpture  functions as a composition in space, its individual elements combining into a larger visual  field that is at once precise and improvisational.

At The Ranch, the work takes on an added resonance. The boats that form its structure are  objects associated with movement, labor, recreation, and navigation—familiar elements  within the maritime culture of the East End. Yet Rubins liberates these vessels from the  water entirely. Designed to float, drift, and carry us across the surface of lakes, rivers, and  oceans, they are instead suspended in air, transformed into a floating constellation held in  delicate equilibrium. Installed against the open sky and expansive landscape of Montauk,  Friends of Pluto shifts our understanding of these familiar forms, exchanging buoyancy for  flight and navigation for abstraction. The result is a sculpture that feels simultaneously  grounded and weightless, anchored to the earth while reaching toward the sky.

PAUL MCCARTHY - Sisters (2013)

Widely regarded as one of the most influential artists of his generation, Paul McCarthy has  spent more than five decades challenging the boundaries between sculpture,  performance, popular culture, and psychological narrative. After moving West from Utah,  McCarthy studied at the San Francisco Art Institute before earning an MFA from the  University of Southern California in 1973. From his earliest performances to his  monumental sculptures and immersive installations, his work has consistently explored  the uneasy terrain where fantasy and reality collide, exposing the anxieties, absurdities,  and contradictions embedded within American culture.

Sisters (2013) exemplifies McCarthy's ability to transform familiar imagery into something  simultaneously monumental and unsettling. Developed through an extended process of  modeling, duplication, scanning, enlargement, and recombination, the work evolved from a  modest figurine into a towering bronze sculpture measuring nearly twenty feet in height.  Oscillating between figuration and abstraction, humor and unease, Sisters reveals  McCarthy's enduring fascination with transformation—how images, stories, and cultural  symbols are distorted, amplified, and reimagined through scale. While Sisters exists here  as a monumental bronze, its original models, prototypes, and material iterations remain in  McCarthy's Los Angeles studio, preserving the sculpture's evolution and serving as a living  archive of its making.

For McCarthy, more is more. The accumulation of forms, narratives, and gestures pushes  the work toward excess, where monumentality becomes both a physical condition and a  psychological one. At The Ranch, the sculpture's imposing presence engages directly with  the surrounding landscape, extending McCarthy's exploration of monumentality into  dialogue with the vastness of the natural world.

MATT JOHNSON - Meditating Figure (2026)

Matt Johnson's work transforms the familiar materials of contemporary life into objects of  unexpected wonder, humor, and reflection. After moving West to attend UCLA, where he  studied under Chris Burden and Nancy Rubins, Johnson developed a practice that draws  equally from art history, architecture, industry, and the built environment of Southern  California. Working from his studio in Malibu, he uncovers the poetic potential hidden  within everyday objects, revealing how even the most utilitarian forms can become vessels  for larger questions about culture, perception, and our place within the world.

Created specifically for LA Monumental, Johnson hand selected the exact shipping  containers with color and global representation in mind, and assembled on-site,  Meditating Figure (2026) is composed of twelve decommissioned shipping containers  assembled into a monumental seated figure. Rising sixty feet in height and width, the  sculpture depicts a giant human form seated in the lotus position, its simplified features  conveying a surprising sense of calm and contemplation. Constructed from one of the  defining objects of global commerce, the work transforms the infrastructure of trade into  an image of stillness, introspection, and spiritual presence.

Johnson's sculpture aligns itself with a long history of colossal figurative monuments,  from ancient religious icons to contemporary public sculpture. Yet Meditating Figure  remains unmistakably of our own time. Containers designed to move goods across  oceans and continents are repurposed into what the artist describes as "a deity built by  capital and consumption"—a figure shaped as much by globalization and industry as by  timeless human desires for meaning, connection, and transcendence. Installed at The  Ranch the work enters into dialogue with both the natural landscape and the vast systems  of commerce that increasingly define the modern world. Long before becoming sculpture,  the retired shipping containers had collectively traveled an estimated 12 million miles— enough to circle the Earth nearly 500 times. Their history of movement becomes  embedded in a work devoted not to commerce, but to contemplation. At once playful and  profound, Meditating Figure transforms the materials of global exchange into a  contemporary monument for contemplation.

Monumental exhibitions require monumental efforts from many unsung heroes. Special  thanks to Alex Scull, who collaborated with The Ranch in the conception and realization of  LA Monumental, helping shape the exhibition from ideation through installation. Sincere  thanks to Michael O'Toole of Dash 7 and Andrew Logan of Andrew Logan Projects for their  invaluable expertise and support in bringing all three monumental sculptures to life.  Special thanks as well to Jonas Wood for creating a forthcoming poster featuring Matt  Johnson's Meditating Figure.

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 The Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney  Museum of American Art, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; 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 Hammer 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  Fearnley Museum of Art, Oslo; and Ekebergparken Sculpture Park, Oslo, among others.