Charles Ray: Figure Ground

Baum, Kelly, and Brinda Kumar, with contributions by Charles Ray and Hal Foster (2022)

This title is in print.

Publication Details

Description

This incisive publication explores the formal, conceptual, political, and technical aspects of the work of contemporary American artist Charles Ray.

For Charles Ray (born 1953), sculpture is a way of thinking that informs his work across a wide range of media-from gelatin silver prints to porcelain, fiberglass, wood, and steel. Spanning the whole of his fifty-year career, Charles Ray: Figure Ground considers the artist's intriguing, often unsettling sculptures from both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in relation to his early photographs and performances. It also explores his interest in Mark Twain's 1884 novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Kelly Baum addresses patterns and patterning in Ray's art, foregrounding his engagement with preexisting traditions, classicism among them, as well as charged issues around race, gender, and sexuality. Brinda Kumar investigates the modalities of touch that run through Ray's work, while a reflection by Ray himself and a conversation between the artist and Hal Foster offer further insights into his multifaceted practice.

Table of contents

Director’s Foreword
Acknowledgments

Patterns
Kelly Baum

Holding Space
Brinda Kumar

Sculpture in a Cultural Square
Charles Ray in Conversation with Hal Foster

Plates

Floating through the Exhibition with Huck and Jim
Charles Ray

Notes
Works in the Exhibition
Index

About the authors

Kelly Baum is the Cynthia Hazen Polsky and Leon Polsky Curator of Contemporary Art in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Brinda Kumar is associate curator in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Hal Foster is the Townsend Martin, Class of 1917, Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University, New Jersey.

Related Titles

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Modern and Contemporary Art

Titles by author (15)

Kelly Baum

Hal Foster

Brinda Kumar

Charles Ray

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Exhibition

Charles Ray: Figure Ground

January 31–June 5, 2022

Charles Ray: Figure Ground presents the work of one of the most important artists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. For over five decades, Ray (born Chicago, 1953) has experimented with a wide range of methods, including performance, photography, and sculpture, the medium for which he is best recognized today. In the process, he has utilized a variety of materials, expanded the fundamental terms of sculptural language, and pioneered major advances in production, combining the analog and the digital as well as human and robotic hands. Additionally, Ray’s work addresses in elliptical, often irreverent ways not only art history, popular culture, and mass media but also identity, mortality, race, and gender.

This exhibition unites sculptures from every period of Ray’s career with key photographs from the 1970s and 1980s, exploring central aspects of his challenging and sometimes provocative oeuvre. It also brings together for the first time all the works that Ray loosely patterned on Mark Twain’s 1885 novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Located at The Met, whose collection the artist has studied closely for many years, Charles Ray: Figure Ground features a suite of judiciously placed works whose arrangement in space forges subtle connections between objects and viewers. Similar to a philosopher’s stone, which keeps the process of interpretation in constant motion, Ray’s sculpture poses many trenchant questions but answers none directly.

Plan Ahead

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