The Ranch is pleased to present Nancy Rubins: Drawing and Sculpture, organized in collaboration with Alex Scull. Installed inside the West Barn, the exhibition brings together fifteen drawings spanning over fifteen years of production, dating from 2005 to 2021. Illuminating the adjacent pasture, the exhibition includes an aluminum sculpture, Agrifauna Delicata I, 2017, from Rubins’s Diversifolia series. Together, these works form a dynamic constellation of forms that reveals the breadth of Rubins’s practice across scale, medium, and perception. Concurrently, Rubins’s latest canoe and boat sculpture, Friends of Pluto, 2026, will be unveiled on June 27th as part of LA Monumental.

The drawings, selected in close collaboration with the artist during visits to her studio in Topanga Canyon, California, range in scale from intimate to immersive. In Topanga, surrounded by the raw materials and expansive environment of Rubins’s studio, the drawings present as extensions of a lived, physical process. In the West Barn, they become distilled, formal propositions. They challenge not only how drawing operates within space, but also unsettle any fixed understanding of what drawing is, or can be.

At first glance, Rubins’s drawings appear undeniably sculptural – dense, tensile, and metallic. When one encounters them for the first time, it is assumed they are made of metal. The mind searches for weight, for gravity, for the familiar logic of mass. Yet these works resist that instinct. Rendered with a precision that borders on illusion, they enact a kind of visual alchemy: a transformation of line into structure, of surface into volume; a perceptual phase change in which drawing destabilizes into sculpture, and back again.

As Rubins herself reflects, “What’s light is heavy, what’s heavy is light.”

This inversion is central to the experience of Rubins’s work. Dialogue with Rubins’s aluminum sculptures underscores the drawings’ play with material, surface, and volume. The dynamic forms of these sculptures strain against one another as they spiral weightlessly upward, transforming accumulations of readymade objects into systems of tension, balance, and release. In conversation with the drawings presented in the West Barn, Agrifauna Delicata I, 2017, maintains a similarly monochromatic presence, extending the drawings’ perceptual instability into three-dimensional space.

The tensile equilibrium of Rubins’s aluminum sculptures builds upon the structural experiments of Kenneth Snelson, whose systems of “floating compression” transformed weight and tension into seemingly weightless form. Yet where Snelson pursued geometric clarity, Rubins embraces accumulation, imbalance, and excess. As the artist explains, “I am interested in the balance, the engineering and tenuousness of the objects, as well as the dynamic tension and energy…A continuum starts happening with one piece attached to another… the way that crystals or cells grow.”

This sense of continuous growth has led critics and scholars to situate Rubins’s drawings and sculpture in relation to landscape, suggesting affinities with land, sea, or even cosmic space. Their tangled accumulations and suspended tensions evoke geological formations, oceanic debris, or orbital clusters. And yet, just as quickly, they withdraw from these associations. They are not quite of land, sea, or sky, but operate in a space adjacent to all three – untethered, self-generating, and insistently present.

Nancy Rubins: Drawing and Sculpture coincides with LA Monumental, a large-scale outdoor sculpture exhibition across The Ranch’s grounds featuring Rubins’s latest monumental sculpture, Friends of Pluto, 2026, made of 55 canoes, rowboats, and Jon boats. Together, these presentations offer a rare opportunity to experience the full arc of her thinking, from the monumental to the intimate, from the materially dense to the perceptually elusive.

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.