Returned to lender The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
Rotating circle
Charles Ray American
Not on view
After foregrounding his own body in several works made in the 1970s and 1980s, Ray began to create sculptural interventions that bear only the subtlest trace of his presence. The titular circle of this work is scaled to the artist’s height and embedded in the wall. It spins in place thanks to an unseen yet audible electric motor, rotating with such speed that it appears stationary, like a line incised into the wall. Holding in tension kineticism and stasis, visuality and aurality, presence and absence, drawing and sculpture, the work is also a slyly if radically abstracted self-portrait. The artist once described it as "a portal into my mind—placid on the outside but spinning furiously on the inside."
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