Charles Ray (artist)

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. Christopher Knight in the Los Angeles Times wrote that Ray’s “career as an artist…is easily among the most important of the last twenty years.”

Charles Ray was born in Chicago as the son of Helen and Wade Ray. He has four brothers and a sister. 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 Ray to many of developments of Modernist sculpture, in particular the constructivist aesthetic of artists like Anthony Caro and David Smith. In an interview, Ray spoke of his artistic education and early influences.

"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 has headed the sculpture department at UCLA since 1981.

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.

...
Wikipedia