Ruby Neri's "Horse & Rider" (2012) is a commanding large-scale sculpture that fuses raw material honesty with a deeply expressive figural language. Constructed from plastic reinforced with steel and animated by layers of acrylic and oil paint, the work stands over two meters tall, filling space with both physical weight and psychological presence. Neri's treatment of surface is characteristically visceral, the paint applied with an urgency that echoes the folk ceramic traditions she draws upon while simultaneously asserting a thoroughly contemporary sensibility. The result is a work that feels simultaneously ancient and immediate, rooted in ritual imagery yet fully alive within the context of twenty-first century sculpture. The horse and rider as subject carries centuries of symbolic freight, invoking themes of power, control, vulnerability, and the uneasy relationship between human will and animal force. Neri reanimates this iconography with a destabilizing energy, refusing heroic monumentality in favor of something more psychologically complex and emotionally unresolved. Her figures tend to exist at the threshold between the archetypal and the intimate, and this work is no exception. The scale amplifies rather than distances, drawing the viewer into a confrontation with the sculpture's charged interior life. Signed by the artist, this work represents Neri at a confident and fully realized moment in her practice, several years into the expanded sculptural output that earned her significant critical attention. For collectors seeking a work that commands architectural space while sustaining close looking, "Horse & Rider" offers both formal authority and genuine expressive depth. Its materials, scale, and subject matter position it as a significant object within any serious collection focused on contemporary figuration or American sculpture of the past two decades.