Organized by the Art Institute of Chicago in partnership with Kunstmuseum Basel, with the full cooperation of the artist, Charles Ray: Sculpture, 1997-2014 surveys work produced by this celebrated Chicago-born, Los Angeles-based sculptor over the past two decades. The first major exhibition since a mid-career retrospective in 1998, Charles Ray will pick up where the prior exhibition left off to include 19 works made by the artist between 1997 and 2014, presenting a full range of his most recent achievements with particular emphasis on figurative experiments. The Art Institute will be the sole United States venue, and three sculptures — Horse and Rider and Huck and Jim, both of 2014 and currently in production; the museum’s Hinoki of 2007; and Handheld Bird of 2006 — will be presented only in Chicago.On technical and formal levels, Ray has been redefining the possibilities of contemporary sculptural practice since the early 1980s. Ray’s recent, pioneering use of solid, machined aluminum and stainless steel is entirely new to the history of art. Solidity is very often a fundamental tenet. The exhibition will argue that, beginning with Unpainted Sculpture (1997), the artist has sought to embed his sculptures literally in space and time in order to make them more emphatically present, both physically and psychologically. Materially and conceptually dense, newer sculptures often emerge from a long process of study, experimentation, refinement, and meticulous execution. Ray himself has described his objects not as the product of an obsessive practice but rather as the manifestation of “discipline and persistence.” In fact, rather than taking time to sculpt, the artist uses time to sculpt. Perhaps the most relevant analogy for Ray’s process is that of a river eroding or reshaping stones over time.The temporal facets of his recent achievements include their glacial incubation, highly technical creation, and carefully controlled display. The works uncannily draw the artist’s and the viewer’s personal and collective pasts into series of physical actions — including both this labor and subtle movements arrested by his forms — a matrix of migrating allusions and allegorical meaning. A substantial catalogue accompanies the exhibition, with new critical texts by four authors who bring a diverse and multidisciplinary approach to the examination of the artist’s work. Contributors include co-curator James Rondeau, the Dittmer Chair and Curator, Department of Contemporary Art at the Art Institute; Richard Neer, William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor of Art History and Cinema and Media Studies, University of Chicago; Anne Wagner, Class of 1936 Professor Emerita, University of California, Berkeley; and Michael Fried, Professor and J. R. Herbert Boone Chair in the Humanities, Johns Hopkins University.
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