Join Kelly Baum, Cynthia Hazen Polsky and Leon Polsky Curator, and Brinda Kumar, Associate Curator, to explore this exhibition, which presents the work of one of the most important contemporary artists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: Charles Ray (born Chicago, 1953).
For over five decades, Ray 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 and pioneered major advances in sculptural production. 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 in a range of materials from every period of Ray’s career with key early photographs, exploring central aspects of his challenging and sometimes provocative oeuvre. Located at The Met, whose collection the artist has studied closely for many years, Charles Ray: Figure Ground features a suite of works whose arrangement in space forges subtle connections between objects and viewers.
