Charles Ray
dal 13/6/2014 al 27/9/2014
Segnalato da
13/6/2014
Charles Ray
Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel
Sculpture, 1997-2014. His fascinating cosmos turns less on narrative context than on sculptural principles and questions of proportion, dimension, space, weight, and the relationship of inner to outer. By perpetuating a long tradition of figural work the show forms a kind of turning point in Ray's oeuvre.
Curator Bernhard Mendes Bürgi
The American Charles Ray is one of the most important artists of his generation. After
a century of dominance by sculptural abstraction, he has developed a new approach
to three-dimensional figuration. This exhibition, presented by the Kunstmuseum Basel
and Museum für Gegenwartskunst in collaboration with the Art Institute of Chicago,
provides an overview of Ray’s work since 1997. Alongside familiar pieces such as
Unpainted Sculpture
(1997) and
Boy with Frog
(2009), visitors will have a chance to
see new sculptures such as
Mime
and
School Play
(both 2014), all of which are the
outcome of several years of work.
Charles Ray was born in Chicago in 1953 and has lived in Los Angeles since 1981. His
fascinating cosmos turns less on narrative context than on sculptural principles and
questions of proportion, dimension, space, weight, and the relationship of inner to outer.
Putting an end to sculptural abstraction’s hundred-year-long dominance, Ray, like Katharina
Fritsch or Jeff Koons, is working on a new approach to three-dimensional figuration, as can
be seen in his
Boy with Frog
(2009) made of white-painted steel and installed until just
recently on the Punta della Dogana in Venice. The superbly executed sculpture is a curiously
timeless piece; many of those who see it do not immediately identify it as a work of
contemporary art.
The Kunstmuseum Basel and the Art Institute of Chicago are together staging a major
exhibition of this American artist, the first since 2006, that will concentrate on his oeuvre from
1997 to 2014. The works produced between 1973 and 1993 were the subject of exhibitions
held in Malmö and London and at Kunsthalle Bern and Kunsthalle Zurich in 1994. Those
European shows traced Ray’s path from the performative explorations of his own body
interacting with sculpted elements of the 1970s—documented in photographs—to the
sculpture called
Family Romance
(1993), a four-figure group of two parents and two children,
disconcertingly identical in size, now in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. There were
comparable shows in 1998/99 in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, where works
produced after the European tour, such as Ray’s
Unpainted Sculpture
(1997) from the
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, were also exhibited.
This exhibition begins with
Unpainted Sculpture. To create this work, Ray took apart a
wrecked Pontiac and then reassembled it out of its myriad small pieces cast in fiberglass to
create a new whole.
Also on view is
Aluminum Girl
(2003), a life-size, plinth-free statue made of white-painted
aluminum, which began life as a painted wood sculpture produced while the artist was
working on
Unpainted Sculpture. Whereas Ray’s reflections on the stereotyping of the
human figure at first played on the synthetic quality of the display-window mannequin, Aluminum Girl
evinces all the grace and the sculpted beauty of antique statuary. Yet this is
no idealized figure; on the contrary, she has all the true-to-life imperfections of an average
young woman. By perpetuating a long tradition of figural sculpture, the work forms a kind of
turning point in Ray’s oeuvre.
The more recent sculptures are made of unpainted machined steel or aluminum:
Shoe Tie
(2012), a male nude squatting to tie his imaginary shoelaces;
Sleeping Woman
(2012), the
figure of a homeless woman fast asleep on a sidewalk bench in Santa Monica; and
Mime
(2014), the most recent of the works exhibited, which shows a person miming sleep.
Nearly every one of the fifteen works exhibited at the Kunstmuseum Basel and the Museum
für Gegenwartskunst claims its own space, for as the outcome of years of trial and error,
each piece constitutes a stand-alone sculpture as well as another stage in Ray’s artistic
engagement with the world.
Sponsors
Novartis International AG >br>
Stiftung für das Kunstmuseum Basel
Catalogue
Essays by Michael Fried, Richard Neer, James Rondeau, and Anne M. Wagner, as well as
brief texts by Charles Ray himself in the catalogue section.
160 pages, 69 illustrations, 24 x 30 cm, hardcover, German and English edition, Verlag
Hatje Cantz.
Image: Boy with Frog, 2009
Press Office
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Opening Saturday 14.06.2014, 5p.m.
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