{"id":665533,"date":"2026-11-03T10:54:18","date_gmt":"2026-11-03T10:54:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/665533\/"},"modified":"2026-11-03T10:54:18","modified_gmt":"2026-11-03T10:54:18","slug":"has-time-been-unkind-to-charles-rays-sculptures","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/665533\/","title":{"rendered":"Has Time Been Unkind to Charles Ray\u2019s Sculptures?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Decades ago, the artist\u2019s conservative sculptures might have enjoyed the assumptions of postmodernism. What about now?<\/p>\n

Calvin Tomkins, illustrious profiler of artists, liked numbers. Here, from a 2015 profile in The New Yorker, are his stats on sculptor Charles Ray, son of Chicago and transplanted Angeleno:<\/p>\n

Two marriages
Five Whitney Biennials
Three hours walked per day
Four years on the sculpture Hinoki (2007)
Seven years on Aluminum Girl (2003)
Ten years on Young Man (2012)
15 studio assistants (concurrently employed).<\/p>\n

Similar figures appear often in Ray lore, fuelling the effect attributed to his sculptures: startling, hard-won relationships between form and material, illusion and reality. This much obsession, the assumption follows, must be a one-way street to artistic revelation. <\/p>\n

The highlight of Ray\u2019s self-titled exhibition at Kassel\u2019s Fridericianum is Oh! Charley, Charley, Charley\u2026 (1992), a high-wire act of pathos and cheek that is also the show\u2019s oldest work. Eight naked bodies, representing young Charles, sprawl on the floor. Fashioned from handpainted fibreglass and synthetic hair, they pleasure one another, at once giddy and stiff. Ray\u2019s well-rendered member is only half alive. It\u2019s a beautifully unmoralising vignette of depressive self-obsession. Oh! Charley\u2026 suggests another fantasy: an alternate reality in which Ray kept plumbing fixations and perversions with his own two hands. Instead, as this exhibition reaffirms, production for production\u2019s sake would come to surreptitiously enter his motives, albeit guised \u2013 maybe even to Ray himself \u2013 as an investigation into the magic of material and surface, and at extravagant expenditures of time and money.<\/p>\n

Clothes Pile (2020) \u2013 placed, cheekily, a few metres from the naked figures in Oh! Charley\u2026 \u2013 is exactly what it sounds like, made from aluminium and (you\u2019re going to hear these words a lot) painted white. In the same room, Return to the One (2020), a lifesize self-portrait in stark white papier-m\u00e2ch\u00e9 shows an older Charles, sitting and staring at his own orgy. The narrative suggestion, here, is of an older man looking back on more exuberant days, with an easy, slouching resignation. I tried out this perspective two or three times. But with each attempt, the self-referential circuit between the sculptures seemed too tight, throttling the potential for humour. (The room\u2019s rigid layout doesn\u2019t help: the three sculptures arranged in a line down the centre of the space, as if to prevent viewers from brushing against the walls.)<\/p>\n

\"\"Return to the One, 2020 (installation view, 2026). Photo: Nicolas Wefers. \u00a9 the artist, Documenta and Museum Fridericianum, Kassel<\/p>\n

During his bachelor\u2019s degree at the University of Iowa, Ray was influenced by sculptor Roland Brener, a pupil of Anthony Caro. Looking at Oh! Charley\u2026 with this in mind, you can see Caro\u2019s trickledown influence, with the interlocking torsos and limbs of those eight bodies as figurative afterimages of Caro\u2019s steel planes and cantilevered bars. In 1979 Ray completed his MFA at Rutgers. Unmistakably, he\u2019s also a creature of 1980s postmodern simulacrum-mania. He bears kinship with Jeff Koons, whose Porcelain Series from the last decade enlarges figurines of Greek gods, aristocrats and animals, in mirrored stainless steel. Using machined aluminium to similar effect, Ray\u2019s show features Mountain Lion Attacking a Dog (2018) as well as an oversize Madonna and Child (2026) in white-painted carbon fibre. Koons, unlike Ray, benefits from gall, which allows him to convert decadence into self-assured, repulsive humour.<\/p>\n

\"\"Mountain Lion Attacking a Dog (detail), 2018 (installation view, 2026). Photo: Nicolas Wefers. \u00a9 the artist, Documenta and Museum Fridericianum, Kassel<\/p>\n

Impish curiosity, prankster wit and crystal-clear vision charged Ray\u2019s best works, none of which, however \u2013 excepting the aforementioned \u2013 made it to Kassel. Firetruck (1993), a children\u2019s toy enlarged to life size, was once parked on Manhattan\u2019s Madison Avenue, outside the Whitney. Since 1981 Ray has taught at UCLA, and Firetruck shares the puerile humour of LA\u2019s best pranksters \u2013 see the somewhat Ray-ish Sweet Brown Snail (2007) by Paul McCarthy and Jason Rhoades, for example, a toy snail enlarged to elephant size and installed outside Munich\u2019s Transit Museum. Despite being simple ideas \u2013 cheap tricks, even \u2013 these pieces are very hard not to love. Ray\u2019s student work, meanwhile, shows the piercing humour he\u2019s capable of without blank-cheque budgets. Plank Piece (1973, not on show) consists of two old photographs, in which Ray hangs perilously, as the titular plank pinches his body against a wall. You can almost feel wood punishing rib, air leaving abdomen.<\/p>\n

\"\"Firetruck, 1993, painted aluminium, fibreglass and plexiglass, 336 \u00d7 224 \u00d7 1417 cm. \u00a9 the artist. Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York<\/p>\n

By the time I first saw Ray\u2019s work in the flesh, in 2015, there were signs that glitz was blanching irreverence. In that year, New York\u2019s Matthew Marks Gallery devoted a big room to Baled Truck (2014), a stainless-steel, three-metre-long facsimile of a compacted truck. Then a master\u2019s student at Rutgers, I felt a quasi-familial identification with Ray. But as I stood over the mangled wreck, waiting for its aura to arrive, I was perplexed. Around that time I\u2019d been experiencing sudden attacks of depressed nausea in other wealth-saturated Chelsea galleries. In hindsight I understand these moments as physiological responses to the awareness of being pulled into a black hole of abject wealth and financial speculation by art, a force that had once been inspiring, magical, freeing. Ray\u2019s exhibition in Kassel triggered flashbacks to those disenchanted moments \u2013 an effect amplified, no doubt, by my anticipatory excitement at seeing it.<\/p>\n

This unfortunate result seems not-incidental; a central principle of Ray\u2019s work, emphasised in interviews and profiles, is that material communicates. For art historians, an interesting question may entail finding the precise moment in his career when a deliberately engineered alienation effect, which caused viewers to rethink their perception of reality, was eclipsed by a more simplistic and vulgar kind of alienation, decisively separating the sculptures from the lifeworlds of most people. Whatever its specific time frame, the tipping point surely had a lot to do with money. An original Ray will set you back a chilly $3 million. No wonder that the museum attendants in Kassel seemed so eager to keep me company.<\/p>\n

On paper, the show\u2019s most intimate work should be Aluminum Girl, a slightly undersize rendition of Ray\u2019s now-ex-girlfriend Jennifer Pastor. Pastor stands there naked, milky white and, for some reason that I\u2019d rather not think about, void of expression, or pupils. The same is true of Boy with Frog (2009), in which an unclothed young boy dangles said amphibian from his outstretched hand. Here, as with Aluminum Girl, a conspicuous discrepancy opens between the affective potential of the sculpture and the flat effect of its execution. In an abstract sense, the image of a boy playing in nature is moving. It has become all the more so as children, once left to their own devices in nature, are lured into screens, to deleterious and tragic effect. Deep down, a sensitive disposition inhabits both Boy with Frog, and Aluminum Girl, albeit muffled by over-production and faux ethereality (more satin white paint).<\/p>\n

\"\"Aluminum Girl, 2003 (installation view, 2026). Photo: Nicolas Wefers. \u00a9 the artist, Documenta and Museum Fridericianum, Kassel<\/p>\n

\"\"Boy with Frog (detail), 2009, cast stainless steel with acrylic polyurethane, 244 \u00d7 75 \u00d7 105 cm. Photo: Joshua White. Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York<\/p>\n

Peter Schjeldahl<\/a> opened his 1993 Parkett profile of Ray with a fancy sailboat outing, before praising Ray\u2019s ability to fool perception using tricks of material and surface. His case study was Ink Box (1986), a steel cube filled with ink, whose glossy surface so closely mimicked the box\u2019s dark metal sides that visitors ran their fingers over it, before cleaning them on the gallery walls. Subsequently, it seems, Ray became obsessed with the power of specific combinations of substance and form to baffle cognition. I imagine this belief growing over the years like an invasive plant, pushing out the other qualities which enspirited his work: colour, touch, humour, kink.<\/p>\n

Of the newish works in Kassel, the only dazzler was School Play (2014), a slightly oversize recreation of a dagger-wielding boy, again stainless steel, this time matt. I thought I caught a trace of handwork in the form of several jagged patterns on his head. Excited, I pointed them out to a gallery attendant. \u201cYeah,\u201d he replied, politely bored, \u201cthose are marks left by the machine that made it.\u201d This situation used to be less troubling; now, it\u2019s become embroiled in a high-stakes question of what art stands for. Through the 1990s and 2000s, machine fabrication felt like a welcome negation of the artist\u2019s hand and thus sentimentality. But with AI oligarchs having supercharged the machinic mimicry of human creativity, things have changed. The generous read of this situation is that Ray\u2019s art is incisively mirroring life. But he isn\u2019t that guy. He lacks Koons\u2019s evil genius.<\/p>\n

\"\"School Play, 2014 (installation view, 2026). Photo: Nicolas Wefers. \u00a9 the artist, Documenta and Museum Fridericianum, Kassel<\/p>\n

\"\"Plank Piece I, 1973, gelatin silver print, 102 \u00d7 69 cm. \u00a9 the artist. Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York<\/p>\n

Ray does do masterful impressions of European power statuary. Aesthetically speaking, the aforementioned Madonna and Child isn\u2019t as far as Ray might like to think from the marble statue of Friedrich II, Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel, that faces the Fridericianum. The stone lion that rests around the corner from this figure could be a cousin of Ray\u2019s miniature concrete bull (Bull, 2026). As sculpture, Flounder (2021) has no more life than the fish it pictures, expiring on a cube, in darkly patinaed bronze, but its subject\u2019s small vulnerability is a breath of fresh air. In Tomkins\u2019s profile, Ray is eloquent on time and art \u2013 how the former alters the latter\u2019s meaning. It\u2019s true. A couple of decades ago, these conservative sculptures might have enjoyed the assumptions of postmodernism: an abiding, protective irony. Not anymore. The necessary alliance of this profoundly expensive art with the gilded class flattens satiric distance and reveals macabre structural loyalties. At a certain point, the giant brick of custom-milled stainless steel that an artist has plopped in the gallery might not be so different from a silver brick; at a certain point, reactionary statues might just be reactionary statues, no matter how freaky and free, deep down, their maker is.<\/p>\n

A poster for the exhibition shows Ray alone in his studio. The 1990s have just begun, and the artist is working on his one-man orgy, kneeling amid half-finished body parts, long before the 15 assistants, the addiction to milled steel and white paint. The scene is probably staged, but who cares. Like a model-train builder, Ray ponders his handiwork and grins. This is the Charley that gets me going.<\/p>\n

Charles Ray is on view at Museum Fridericianum, Kassel, through 3 January<\/a><\/p>\n

From the October 2026 issue of\u00a0ArtReview\u00a0\u2013\u00a0get your copy.<\/a><\/p>\n

Mitch Speed<\/a>Features<\/a>2 November 2026ArtReview<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Decades ago, the artist\u2019s conservative sculptures might have enjoyed the assumptions of postmodernism. What about now? Calvin Tomkins,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":665534,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[437,434,435,436,438,146,85,46],"class_list":["post-665533","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-artsdesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/665533","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=665533"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/665533\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/665534"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=665533"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=665533"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=665533"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}