Charles Ray (artist)

Charles Ray (born 1953) is a Los Angeles-based American sculptor. He is known for his strange and enigmatic sculptures that draw the viewer’s perceptual judgments into question in jarring and unexpected ways. Christopher Knight in the Los Angeles Times wrote that Ray’s “career as an artist…is easily among the most important of the last twenty years.”[1]

Early life and education

Charles Ray was born in Chicago as the son of Helen and Wade Ray. He has four brothers and a sister. He earned his BFA at the University of Iowa and his MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University.

Charles Ray, Ink Box, 1986, steel, ink, automobile paint, 36 x 36 x 36 inches

He studied sculpture at the University of Iowa School of Art and Art History with Roland Brener, who exposed Ray to many of developments of Modernist sculpture, in particular the constructivist aesthetic of artists like Anthony Caro and David Smith. In an interview, Ray spoke of his artistic education and early influences.

"Caro’s work was like a template; I saw it as almost platonic. The formal rules as taught by Brener were a kind of nourishment for me. The actual working in the studio was, in a sense, the expression. I was taught that the finished sculpture was maybe the end of the paragraph. Once a sculpture was completed it was critiqued and put back on to the scrap pile. This way of working taught me to think sculpturally rather than to think about sculpture. At this time in my life the historical context of high Modernism was really beyond my grasp. I saw Caro as super-contemporary. His work was, and is, so alive. It bridges the gap between the inside and outside of my mind.[2]"

Ray has headed the sculpture department at UCLA since 1981.[3]

Charles Ray with his Fall '91, 1992, mixed media, 96 x 26 x 36 inches

Work

Ray’s work is difficult to classify. Style, materials, subject, presence, and scale are all variable. Critic Anne Wagner finds the consistent quality to be this: “In all his seamlessly executed objects, Ray fixates on how and why things happen, to say nothing of wondering what really does happen in the field of vision, and how such events might be remade as art.”[4] This and the level of art historical awareness behind his works has led many critics to call Ray a sculptor’s sculptor. Nevertheless, his art has managed to find a large audience, thanks in part to its often striking or beguiling nature.

Ray recapitulated many of the developments in twentieth-century sculpture in his first show in 1971 with an installation entitled One-Stop Gallery. The show consisted of a collection of small sculptures, resting directly on floor. Some of the works, in their attention to materials, were clearly inspired by Minimalist artists like Robert Morris, while two small constructed steel sculptures invoke the traditions taught by his teacher, Brener; they were even painted the same red as Caro’s Early One Morning (1962, Tate Modern). One-Stop Gallery would anticipate the tone for much of Ray’s work to come in its plumbing and reinterpreting of the canon of twentieth-century sculpture without having his own work appeal to any particular period or style. Initially influenced by Caro, by including his own body in his works he made them more like documented performances. In the two-part photographic work Plank Piece I–II (1973), for example, he pinned his body to the wall with a large piece of wood.[5]

In the late 1980s, Ray conceived Minimalist works using ink and wire. In Ink Box (1986), a large cube is filled to the brim with ink, giving the illusion of a solid cube. Ink Line (1987) is a continuous stream of black ink traveling from a dime-size opening in the ceiling into a similar hole in the floor. In Spinning Spot (1987), a section of the floor measuring 24 inches in diameter is set spinning at 33 RPM. Consisting of a single 8.5 foot length of wire, both ends of Moving Wire (1988) protrude from the wall and are set 14 inches apart; as one end of the wire extends out from the wall at random intervals, the other retracts.[6]

Charles Ray, Family Romance, 1993, painted fiberglass and synthetic hair, 53 x 85 x 11 inches

For Unpainted Sculpture (1997), over the course of two years, Ray has reconstructed a life-sized crashed Pontiac Grand Am (circa 1991) out of fiberglass, casting and assembling each piece to match the bent and twisted forms of the original [7] Despite the work’s misleading title, it is painted a soft dove grey that is reminiscent of the plastic parts of model car kits.[8]

Charles Ray, Hinoki, 2007, American cypress

His most labor-intensive work to date is the ten-year re-creation in Japanese cypress (Hinoki) of a fallen and rotting tree he had found in a meadow. With Hinoki (2007, Art Institute of Chicago), Ray had a mold made of a large rotting tree he found in California. He then hired a team of Japanese woodcarvers in Osaka to essentially re-carve the tree in Hinoki, a different wood than that of the original tree. In an interview with Michael Fried, Ray made it clear that the purpose of the piece was not to photorealistically carve an exact replica of the tree. “The tree had that beautiful interior that fallen logs have,” he says. “It happens when bugs eat out the hard wood, so you have this hollow thing. All I knew was that I wanted to carve that, I wanted them to have a sense of that interior [of the log] because it’s in there, even if normally it couldn’t be seen. So that was really important. And then I became involved with the outside as well…It mattered to me that somebody had looked at it, and I wanted to make it matter to you.”[9]

Ray's critically acclaimed Firetruck (1993), a full-size aluminum, fiberglass and Plexiglas installation, has been exhibited on Madison Avenue in New York, in front of the Whitney Museum of American Art. The giant replica of a red toy firetruck was also exhibited outside the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2008.[10]

In 2009, Ray installed Boy with Frog, his first outdoor commissioned work, at the Punta della Dogana, Venice. Grand in size and realized with a smooth white finish that references the important tradition of marble sculpture in Italy, it depicts a boy holding a goliath frog above the Grand Canal. The sculpture calls to mind the Apollo Sauroktonos, an ancient Roman sculpture at the Musée du Louvre in Paris of a nude adolescent reaching out his arm to catch a lizard climbing a tree; and, the Boy with Thorn (Lo Spinario), a bronze statue at the Palazzo dei Conservatori, Musei Capitolini, of a seated Roman boy plucking a thorn from the sole of his foot.[11]

Exhibitions

Charles Ray had his first one-person museum exhibition in 1989 at the Newport Harbor Art Museum (now Orange County Museum of Art). His art has since been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Europe and North America, including a traveling, mid-career retrospective organized by Paul Schimmel for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, which then traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Other solo exhibition venues include the Institute of Contemporary Art, London; Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland; Astrup Fearnley Museet for Moderne Kunst, Oslo, Norway; and Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland.[12] He has exhibited at documenta IX (1992), Venice Biennales in 1993 and 2003, and four Whitney Biennials. In 2012, Ray participated in Lifelike, a group exhibition that originated at the Walker Art Center.[13]

In 2015, Ray's major one-person exhibition opened at the Art Institute of Chicago, “Charles Ray: Sculpture, 1997-2014,” having traveled from the Kunstmuseum Basel in Switzerland.[14] The Art Institute devoted the 18,000 square feet (1,700 square metres) of its second floor Modern Wing to just 17 pieces.[15]

Major works

Selected bibliography

Books on Charles Ray

Articles on Charles Ray

Interviews with Charles Ray

Writings by Charles Ray

References

  1. ↑ Christopher Knight, “Charles Ray’s Hinoki: A Wooden Record of Life,” Los Angeles Times, May 11, 2007.
  2. ↑ Charles Ray and Michael Fried, “Early one Morning…,” Tate Etc., Spring 2005, 5
  3. ↑ Charles Ray / MATRIX 140, November 1, 1990 - December 20, 1990 Archived April 23, 2011, at the Wayback Machine. Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley.
  4. ↑ Anne Wagner, “Charles Ray: Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles,” Artforum, May 1999, 171.
  5. ↑ Charles Ray Tate Collection, London.
  6. ↑ Charles Ray: Ink Line, Moving Wire, Spinning Spot, May 8 - July 10, 2009 Matthew Marks Gallery, New York.
  7. ↑ CHARLES RAY: "UNPAINTED SCULPTURE," 1997, October 18 - November 29, 1997 Archived March 23, 2012, at the Wayback Machine. Regen Projects, Los Angeles.
  8. ↑ Michael Darling, Charles Ray Archived October 19, 2010, at the Wayback Machine. Frieze, Issue 39, March–April 1998.
  9. ↑ Michael Fried, and Charles Ray, “Conversation” in Charles Ray by the Matthew Marks Gallery
  10. ↑ Suzanne Muchnic (April 12, 2008), Public art a victim of its success Los Angeles Times.
  11. ↑ J. Paul Getty Museum To Put Sculpture By Celebrated Los Angeles Artist Charles Ray On View - Model for Artist's "Boy with Frog" makes U.S. debut at the Getty Center Press Release of July 25, 2011.
  12. ↑ Charles Ray - Professor, Sculpture Archived October 22, 2011, at the Wayback Machine. UCLA Department of Art.
  13. ↑ Sheets, Hilarie M. (April 19, 2012). "Use Your Illusion". ARTnews. Retrieved May 3, 2013.
  14. ↑
  15. ↑ Ken Johnson (May 22, 2015), ‘Charles Ray: Sculpture 1997-2014’ Is at the Art Institute of Chicago New York Times.
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