Into every one of his works, the sculptor Charles Ray seeks to imbue life. Born in Chicago in 1953, Ray’s early pieces were composed of steel rods, bricks, and other industrial objects stacked on top of each other. When he began to question the fundamentals of his medium, he turned to the human body as a generative force. “For me, sculpture is a behavior rather than a practice,” he told The Brooklyn Rail. “Sculpture is a punctuation mark in an activity, and is the ultimate result of my behavior.” In his statues, often nude, Ray manifests American-ness in the style of ancient Greek realism. He is not afraid to be provocative. Ray’s latest exhibition, shared between two galleries, has been over a decade in the making. Matthew Marks features three new sculptures that include Fallen Horse (2025), carved from a single block of granite. At Jeffrey Deitch, three of his best known yet rarely exhibited works go on display: Firetruck (1993), a child’s toy enlarged to life-size proportions, Pepto-Bismol in a Marble Box (1988), and Table (1990). —Maggie Turner