Charles Ray (born 1953) is a

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-based American

sculptor Sculpture is the branch of the visual arts that operates in three dimensions. Sculpture is the three-dimensional art work which is physically presented in the dimensions of height, width and depth. It is one of the plastic arts. Durable sc ...

. 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 ''

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'' wrote that Ray's "career as an artist…is easily among the most important of the last twenty years."

Early life and education

Charles Ray was born in

Chicago (''City in a Garden''); I Will , image_map = , map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago , coordinates = , coordinates_footnotes = , subdivision_type = Country , subdivision_name ...

as the son of Helen and Wade Ray. His parents owned and ran a commercial art school which his grandmother had founded in 1916. He was the second oldest in his family and has four brothers and a sister. The family moved to

Winnetka, Illinois Winnetka () is a village in Cook County, Illinois, United States, located north of downtown Chicago. The population was 12,316 as of 2019. The village is one of the wealthiest places in the nation in terms of household income. It was the second- ...

, in 1960. Charles and his older brother, Peter, attended high school at the Catholic Marmion Military Academy in Aurora, Illinois, where their father had gone. On Saturdays he went to the Art Institute's studio program for high-school students. He earned his BFA at the

University of Iowa The University of Iowa (UI, U of I, UIowa, or simply Iowa) is a public university, public research university in Iowa City, Iowa, United States. Founded in 1847, it is the oldest and largest university in the state. The University of Iowa is org ...

and his MFA from

Mason Gross School of the Arts Mason Gross School of the Arts is the arts conservatory at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. It is named for Mason W. Gross, the sixteenth president of Rutgers. Mason Gross offers the Bachelor of Fine Arts in Dance, Theater, Digi ...

Rutgers University Rutgers University (; RU), officially Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, is a Public university, public land-grant research university consisting of four campuses in New Jersey. Chartered in 1766, Rutgers was originally called Queen's ...

. He studied sculpture at the

University of Iowa School of Art and Art History The University of Iowa School of Art and Art History is a top 10 public art school in the US. The school is part of the University of Iowa located in Iowa City, IA which awards undergraduate and graduate degrees in Art and Art history. The gradu ...

with

Roland Brener Roland Brener (February 22, 1942 – March 22, 2006) was a South African-born Canadian artist. Life Brener was born Roland Albert Brener on February 22, 1942, in Johannesburg. He studied art at Saint Martin's School of Art under Anthony Caro ...

, who exposed Ray to many of developments of

Modernist Modernism is both a philosophical and arts movement that arose from broad transformations in Western society during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The movement reflected a desire for the creation of new forms of art, philosophy, an ...

sculpture, in particular the constructivist aesthetic of artists like

Anthony Caro Sir Anthony Alfred Caro (8 March 192423 October 2013) was an English abstract sculptor whose work is characterised by assemblages of metal using ' found' industrial objects. His style was of the modernist school, having worked with Henry Moor ...

and David Smith. He later studied with Stephen Zaima, where Ray executed many of his performance pieces in the undergraduate studio like the Plank Piece. "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." Ray moved to California in 1981 where he headed the sculpture department at

UCLA The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. UCLA's academic roots were established in 1881 as a teachers college then known as the southern branch of the California St ...

since.

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." 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 In visual arts, music and other media, minimalism is an art movement that began in post–World War II in Western art, most strongly with American visual arts in the 1960s and early 1970s. Prominent artists associated with minimalism include Don ...

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 Tate Modern is an art gallery located in London. It houses the United Kingdom's national collection of international modern and contemporary art, and forms part of the Tate group together with Tate Britain, Tate Liverpool and Tate St Ives. It is ...

). 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. 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. Charles-Ray-Boy-with-frog

For ''Unpainted Sculpture'' (1997), over the course of two years, Ray reconstructed a life-sized crashed

Pontiac Grand Am The Pontiac Grand Am is a mid-size car and later a compact car that was produced by Pontiac. The Grand Am had two separate three-year runs in the 1970s: from 1973 to 1975, and again from 1978 to 1980. It was based on the GM A platform. Production ...

(circa 1991) out of fiberglass, casting and assembling each piece to match the bent and twisted forms of the original Despite the work's title, it is painted a soft dove grey that is reminiscent of the plastic parts of model car kits. 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

f the log F, or f, is the sixth letter in the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''ef'' (pronounced ), and the plural is ''efs''. His ...

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." 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 Whitney Museum of American Art, known informally as "The Whitney", is an art museum in the Meatpacking District and West Village neighborhoods of Manhattan in New York City. It was founded in 1930 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875–1942), ...

. The giant replica of a red toy firetruck was also exhibited outside the

Los Angeles County Museum of Art The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is an art museum located on Wilshire Boulevard in the Miracle Mile, Los Angeles, California, Miracle Mile vicinity of Los Angeles. LACMA is on Museum Row, adjacent to the La Brea Tar Pits (George C. Pa ...

in 2008. In 2009, Ray installed ''Boy with Frog'', his first outdoor commissioned work, at the

Punta della Dogana Punta della Dogana is an art museum in one of Venice's old customs buildings, the ''Dogana da Mar''. It also refers to the triangular area of Venice where the Grand Canal meets the Giudecca Canal, and its collection of buildings: Santa Maria dell ...

, Venice. Grand in size and realized with a smooth white finish that references the important tradition of marble sculpture in Italy, it depicted a nine years old boy holding a goliath frog above the Grand Canal. The sculpture called to mind the ''

Apollo Sauroktonos ''Apollo Sauroktonos'' (Apollo Lizard-killer) is the title of several 1st - 2nd century AD Roman marble copies of an original by the ancient Greek sculptor Praxiteles. The statues depict a nude adolescent Apollo about to catch a lizard climbing u ...

'', an ancient Roman sculpture at the

Musée du Louvre The Louvre ( ), or the Louvre Museum ( ), is the world's most-visited museum, and an historic landmark in Paris, France. It is the home of some of the best-known works of art, including the ''Mona Lisa'' and the ''Venus de Milo''. A central l ...

in Paris of a nude adolescent reaching out his arm to catch a lizard climbing a tree; and, the ''

Boy with Thorn ''Boy with Thorn'', also called ''Fedele'' (Fedelino) or ''Spinario'', is a Greco-Roman Hellenistic bronze sculpture of a boy withdrawing a thorn from the sole of his foot, now in the Palazzo dei Conservatori, Rome. There is a Roman marble ver ...

(Lo Spinario)'', a bronze statue at the

Palazzo dei Conservatori The Capitolium or Capitoline Hill ( ; it, Campidoglio ; la, Mons Capitolinus ), between the Forum and the Campus Martius, is one of the Seven Hills of Rome. The hill was earlier known as ''Mons Saturnius'', dedicated to the god Saturn. Th ...

Musei Capitolini The Capitoline Museums (Italian: ''Musei Capitolini'') are a group of art and archaeological museums in Piazza del Campidoglio, on top of the Capitoline Hill in Rome, Italy. The historic seats of the museums are Palazzo dei Conservatori and Palazz ...

, of a seated Roman boy plucking a thorn from the sole of his foot. The statue was removed in 2013 and replaced with a lamp-post that had previously occupied the site. Ray’s first work in stone, ''Two Horses'' (2019), is a relief carved from a single block of Virginia granite and weighs more than six tons.

Exhibitions

Ray had his first one-person museum exhibition in 1989 at the Newport Harbor Art Museum (now

Orange County Museum of Art The Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA) is a modern and contemporary art museum located on the campus of the Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa, California. The museum's collection comprises more than 4,500 objects, with a concentration o ...

). 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 Paul Reinhard Schimmel (born August 4, 1940) is an American biophysical chemist and translational medicine pioneer. Career Paul Schimmel is a Professor of Molecular Medicine at The Scripps Research Institute. Prior to joining The Scripps Resear ...

for the

Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA) is a contemporary art museum with two locations in greater Los Angeles, California. The main branch is located on Grand Avenue in Downtown Los Angeles, near the Walt Disney Concert Hall. MOCA's o ...

, which then traveled to the

Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago The Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Chicago is a contemporary art museum near Water Tower Place in downtown Chicago in Cook County, Illinois, United States. The museum, which was established in 1967, is one of the world's largest contemporary ...

and the

. Other solo exhibition venues include the Institute of Contemporary Art, London;

Kunsthalle Bern The Kunsthalle Bern is a ''Kunsthalle'' (art exposition hall) on the Helvetiaplatz in Bern, Switzerland. It was built in 1917–1918 by the Kunsthalle Bern Association and opened on October 5, 1918. Since then, it has been the site of numerous e ...

, Switzerland;

Astrup Fearnley Museet for Moderne Kunst The Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art is a privately owned contemporary art gallery in Oslo in Norway. It was founded and opened to the public in 1993. The collection's main focus is the American appropriation artists from the 1980s, but it i ...

, Oslo, Norway; and Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland. He has exhibited at

documenta IX DOCUMENTA IX was the ninth edition of documenta, a quinquennial contemporary art exhibition. It was held between 13 June and 20 September 1992 in Kassel, Germany. The artistic director was Jan Hoet in collaboration with Bart de Baere, Denys ...

(1992),

Venice Biennale The Venice Biennale (; it, La Biennale di Venezia) is an international cultural exhibition hosted annually in Venice, Italy by the Biennale Foundation. The biennale has been organised every year since 1895, which makes it the oldest of ...

s in 1993 and 2003, and four

Whitney Biennial The Whitney Biennial is a biennial exhibition of contemporary American art, typically by young and lesser known artists, on display at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, United States. The event began as an annual exhibition in ...

s. In 2012, Ray participated in ''Lifelike'', a group exhibition that originated at the

Walker Art Center The Walker Art Center is a multidisciplinary contemporary art center in the Lowry Hill neighborhood of Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States. The Walker is one of the most-visited modern and contemporary art museums in the United States and, t ...

. In 2015, Ray's major one-person exhibition "Charles Ray: Sculpture, 1997-2014" opened at

Kunstmuseum Basel The Kunstmuseum Basel houses the oldest public art collection in the world and is generally considered to be the most important museum of art in Switzerland. It is listed as a heritage site of national significance. Its lineage extends back to t ...

in Switzerland before moving to the

Art Institute of Chicago The Art Institute of Chicago in Chicago's Grant Park, founded in 1879, is one of the oldest and largest art museums in the world. Recognized for its curatorial efforts and popularity among visitors, the museum hosts approximately 1.5 mill ...

. The Art Institute devoted the of its second floor Modern Wing to 17 pieces. In 2022, the

Metropolitan Museum of Art The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City, colloquially "the Met", is the largest art museum in the Americas. Its permanent collection contains over two million works, divided among 17 curatorial departments. The main building at 1000 ...

staged the major solo exhibition "Charles Ray: Figure Ground." 2022 also saw the opening of solo shows at the

Centre Georges Pompidou The Centre Pompidou (), more fully the Centre national d'art et de culture Georges-Pompidou ( en, National Georges Pompidou Centre of Art and Culture), also known as the Pompidou Centre in English, is a complex building in the Beaubourg area of ...

and the

Pinault Collection Pinault Collection is the legal entity holding the artistic and cultural assets of the French businessman François Pinault. It manages the art collection of the Pinault family, its exhibition sites, institutional and cultural partnerships, art lo ...

at the Bourse de Commerce in Paris.

Notable works in public collections

*''Plank Piece I, II'' (1973),

The Broad The Broad () is a contemporary art museum on Grand Avenue in Downtown Los Angeles. The museum is named for philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad, who financed the $140 million building that houses the Broad art collections. It offers free general ...

;

Glenstone Glenstone is a private contemporary art museum in Potomac, Maryland, from downtown Washington, D.C. The museum's exhibitions are drawn from a collection of about 1,300 works from post-World War II artists around the world. It is the largest priv ...

Potomac, Maryland Potomac () is a census-designated place (CDP) in Montgomery County, Maryland, United States, named after the nearby Potomac River. Potomac is the seventh most educated small town in America, based on percentage of residents with postsecondary deg ...

;

Museum of Modern Art The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It plays a major role in developing and collecting modern art, and is often identified as one of ...

New York New York most commonly refers to: * New York City, the most populous city in the United States, located in the state of New York * New York (state), a state in the northeastern United States New York may also refer to: Film and television * '' ...

; and

Tate Tate is an institution that houses, in a network of four art galleries, the United Kingdom's national collection of British art, and international modern and contemporary art. It is not a government institution, but its main sponsor is the U ...

London London is the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary down to the North Sea, and has been a majo ...

*''How a Table Works'' (1986), Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles *''Ink Box'' (1986),

Costa Mesa, California Costa Mesa (; Spanish for "Table Coast") is a city in Orange County, California. Since its incorporation in 1953, the city has grown from a semi-rural farming community of 16,840 to an urban area including part of the South Coast Plaza–John Wa ...

*''Self Portrait'' (1990), Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa, California *''Boy'' (1992),

*''Fall '91'' (1992), The Broad, Los Angeles; and Glenstone, Potomac, Maryland *''Oh! Charley, Charley, Charley...'' (1992),

Rubell Museum The Rubell Museum, formerly the Rubell Family Collection, is a private contemporary art museum with locations in the Allapattah neighborhood of Miami, Florida, and the Southwest Waterfront neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Opened to the public in ...

Miami Miami ( ), officially the City of Miami, known as "the 305", "The Magic City", and "Gateway to the Americas", is a East Coast of the United States, coastal metropolis and the County seat, county seat of Miami-Dade County, Florida, Miami-Dade C ...

*''Family Romance'' (1993), Museum of Modern Art, New York; and

Paris Paris () is the capital and most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), making it the 30th most densely populated city in the world in 2020. S ...

*''Firetruck'' (1993), The Broad, Los Angeles *''Unpainted Sculpture'' (1997),

Minneapolis Minneapolis () is the largest city in Minnesota, United States, and the county seat of Hennepin County. The city is abundant in water, with thirteen lakes, wetlands, the Mississippi River, creeks and waterfalls. Minneapolis has its origins ...

*''Chicken'' (2007), Glenstone, Potomac, Maryland *''Father Figure'' (2007), Glenstone, Potomac, Maryland *''Hinoki'' (2007), Art Institute of Chicago *''Boy with Frog'' (2009),

Philadelphia Museum of Art The Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMoA) is an art museum originally chartered in 1876 for the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. The main museum building was completed in 1928 on Fairmount, a hill located at the northwest end of the Benjamin Fr ...

*''Sleeping Woman'' (2012), Glenstone, Potomac, Maryland; and

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) is a modern and contemporary art museum located in San Francisco, California. A nonprofit organization, SFMOMA holds an internationally recognized collection of modern and contemporary art, and was ...

*''Young Man'' (2012), Pinault Collection, Paris *'' Horse and rider'' (2014), Glenstone, Potomac, Maryland *''Two horses'' (2019),

, New York *''Return to the one'' (2020), Glenstone, Potomac, Maryland

Selected bibliography

Books on Charles Ray

*Bankowsky, Jack, Thomas Crow, Nicholas Cullinan, and Michael Fried. ''Sculpture After Sculpture: Fritsch, Ray, Koons''. Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2014. *Bürgi, Berhand, Douglas Druik, Michael Fried, and Charles Ray. '' Charles Ray: Sculpture, 1997 - 2014''. Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2014. *Ray, Charles. ''Log''. Los Angeles: Self-published, 2009. *Ray, Charles. ''Charles Ray''. Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1998. *Ray, Charles. ''Charles Ray''. Malmö: Rooseum – Center for Contemporary Art, 1994.

Articles on Charles Ray

*Tomkins, Calvin. "Meaning Machines-The sculpture of Charles Ray" The New Yorker, May 11, 2015, pp. 54–59. *Wagner, Anne. "Sculpture After Sculpture." ''Artforum''. February 2015, pp. 226–227. *Schjeldahl, Peter. "No Offense." ''The New Yorker''. 8 March 2010, pp 80–81. *Russeth, Andrew. "Shoeless Ray." ''Observer Arts''. 26 November 2012. pp. B1 - B10. *Hainley, Bruce. "Charles Ray at Regen Projects." ''Artforum'', January 1998, 91. *Knight, Christopher. "Charles Ray's Hinoki: A Wooden Record of Life." ''Los Angeles Times'', May 11, 2007. *Relyea, Lane. "Charles Ray: In the No." ''Artforum'', September 1992, 62-66. *Rutledge, Virginia. "Ray's Reality Hybrids." ''Art in America'', November 1998, 96-100, 142-143. *Wagner, Anne. "Review of 'Charles Ray' at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles." ''Artforum'', May 1999, 171-172.

Interviews with Charles Ray

*Self, Will. "Charles Ray." ''Interview''. February 2013, pp 120–129; 134-135. * Bonami, Francesco. "Charles Ray: A Telephone Conversation." ''Flash Art'', Summer 1992, 98-100. *Fried, Michael. "Early one Morning…" ''Tate Etc.'', Spring 2005, 50-53. *Storr, Robert. "Anxious Spaces." ''Art in America'', November 1998, 101-105, 143-144.

Writings by Charles Ray

*Ray, Charles. "Thinking of Sculpture as Shaped by Space." ''The New York Times'', October 7, 2001, 34. *__________. ''A Four Dimensional Being Writes Poetry on a Field with Sculptures''. New York: Matthew Marks Gallery, 2006. *__________. "1000 Words: Charles Ray Talks about Hinoki, 2007." ''Artforum'', September 2007, 4.

References

External links

Complete biography and list of exhibitions at Matthew Marks

Charles Ray at Mathew MarksCharles Ray
at

Kadist Art Foundation Kadist is an interdisciplinary contemporary arts organization with an international contemporary art collection. In addition to being a collecting body, Kadist hosts artists residencies and produces exhibitions, publications, and public events. ...

{{DEFAULTSORT:Ray, Charles 20th-century American sculptors University of Iowa alumni 1953 births Living people Artists from Chicago 21st-century American sculptors Sculptors from Illinois Rutgers University alumni UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture faculty