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.
Charles was born in Chicago 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, 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 and his MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University.
He studied sculpture at the University of Iowa School of Art and Art History with Roland Brener, who exposed Charles to many of developments of Modernist sculpture, in particular the constructivist aesthetic of artists like Anthony Caro and David Smith. He later studied with Stephen Zaima, where Charles executed many of his performance pieces in the undergraduate studio, like Plank Piece I-II.
Charles moved to California in 1981 where he headed the sculpture department at UCLA since.
Charles’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.
Charles 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. 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.
In 2015, Charles's major one-person exhibition "Charles Ray: Sculpture, 1997-2014" opened at Kunstmuseum Basel in Switzerland before moving to the Art Institute of Chicago. The Art Institute devoted the 18,000 square feet (1,700 square metres) of its second floor Modern Wing to 17 pieces.
In 2022, the Metropolitan Museum of Art staged the major solo exhibition "Charles Ray: Figure Ground." 2022 also saw the opening of solo shows at the Centre Georges Pompidou and the Pinault Collection at the Bourse de Commerce in Paris.
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10 июл 2024
