Charles Ray (artist)

He is known for his strange and enigmatic sculptures that draw the viewer's perceptual judgments into question in jarring and unexpected ways.

In 2007, 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 and his older brother, Peter, attended high school at the Catholic Marmion Military Academy in Aurora, Illinois, where their father had gone.

Some of the works, in their attention to materials, were clearly inspired by minimalist artists like Robert Morris, while two small constructed steel sculptures invoke the traditions taught by his teacher, Brener; they were even painted the same red as Caro's Early One Morning (1962, Tate Modern).

[9] For Unpainted Sculpture (1997), over the course of two years, Ray reconstructed a life-sized crashed Pontiac Grand Am (circa 1991) out of fiberglass, casting and assembling each piece to match the bent and twisted forms of the original [10] Despite the work's title, it is painted a soft dove grey that is reminiscent of the plastic parts of model car kits.

[11] His most labor-intensive work to date is the ten-year re-creation in Japanese cypress (Hinoki) of a fallen and rotting tree he had found in a meadow.

With Hinoki (2007, Art Institute of Chicago), Ray had a mold made of a large rotting tree he found in California.

In an interview with Michael Fried, Ray made it clear that the purpose of the piece was not to photorealistically carve an exact replica of the tree.

"[12] Ray's critically acclaimed Firetruck (1993), a full-size aluminum, fiberglass and Plexiglas installation, has been exhibited on Madison Avenue in New York, in front of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

[14] The sculpture called to mind the Apollo Sauroktonos, an ancient Roman sculpture at the Musée du Louvre in Paris of a nude adolescent reaching out his arm to catch a lizard climbing a tree; and, the Boy with Thorn (Lo Spinario), a bronze statue at the Palazzo dei Conservatori, Musei Capitolini, of a seated Roman boy plucking a thorn from the sole of his foot.

[16][17] In the 2014 art journal Musee Magazine, artist Slater Bradley told editor-in-chief Andrea Blanch that Ray's collaboration with fashion model Tatjana Patitz titled "The Most Beautiful Woman in the World, 1993 (for Parkett 37)" in which the supermodel was depicted as the girl next door, had achieved what social media would do decades later - but in 1993 - and called it extraordinary and genius.

[18] Ray’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.

2022 also saw the opening of solo shows at the Centre Georges Pompidou and the Pinault Collection at the Bourse de Commerce in Paris.