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Charles Ray’s sculptures are often loosely patterned on pre-existing ideas and things. Such is the case with Tractor (2005), which takes as its point of departure a boyhood memory and, more directly, an abandoned vintage tractor found in the San Fernando Valley, California.
Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Charles Ray, Tractor
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Charles Ray’s Archangel (2021) was conceived for an exhibition in Paris. Shocked by terrorist attacks like the one that occurred in the offices of Charlie Hebdo in 2015, Ray envisioned the archangel Gabriel, a guardian figure in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, alighting onto unstable ground.
Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Charles Ray, Archangel
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Having been employed as a department store janitor during his freshman year of college, Charles Ray (b. 1953) understands the unease that a mannequin — an inanimate object that one might readily mistake for a live human — can inspire. Ray’s work is also charged with purely sculptural tensions that exist between surface and interior, armature and appendage and / or size and scale. With Boy (1992), Ray created a particularly disquieting figure.
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Many of Charles Ray’s best-known works are remakes of objects and people taken from the real world. Small but significant alterations to familiar situations give Ray’s practice a disquieting tension. Cloaked in simplicity, his often humorous creations comment on sculpture’s history, from its austere formal issues to its surreal psychological consequences.
Continue reading Pink Thing of The Day: Charles Ray’s Fall ’91