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• In 1846, back when critics were not yet afraid of rendering judgments, Charles Baudelaire went to the Paris Salon and wrote a review that aimed to put an entire art form out of business. Under the title “Why Sculpture Is Boring,” Baudelaire argued that bronze and marble statuary was vague and elusive, and “presents too many faces at once” — 100 different angles — to the spectator. He thought sculpture lacked the authority of painting or architecture, which both made clear where they stand. When “a chance illumination, an effect of lamplight, reveals a beauty which was not the one he had ...
  January 3, 2020 Jason Farago, Now's the Time to Stand Up for Sculpture , The New York Times
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• Charles Ray is a slippery artist for me. In the time that I have been engaging with his work, I have often been surprised by what gives me pause, and by what I find myself returning to days, sometimes even years, after I have seen it. So often, it is something slight: witnessing the slow ripples created by the edges of a woman’s fur sleeve as it dragged through Ink Box (1986), installed in Ray’s 1998 Whitney retrospective; observing the sheen of flowing ink in 1987’s Ink Line and becoming aware, before even reading the title or anything about it, ...
  December 19, 2019-January 20, 2020 Amanda Gluibizzi, ArtSeen, Three Christs, Sleeping Mime, and the Last Supper; Pagan Paradise, Charles Ray and the Hill Collection , The Brooklyn Rail
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• Bright and early on a recent Saturday, Charles Ray, the Los Angeles sculptor, stepped out of the Four Seasons Hotel, and walked west on Fifty-seventh Street. Ray, who is sixty-six, was in town for the opening of a show at the Hill Art Foundation, in Chelsea. At the luxuriously spare nonprofit space, his enigmatic sculptures—a life-size aluminum mime stretched on a camping bed, a sterling-silver mountain lion about to maul a dog, an apple core wrought in gold—were presented alongside Renaissance and Baroque bronzes, among them three Christs, which were selected by the artist from the collection of the hedge-fund ...
  December 2, 2019 Naomi Fry, Speed Walking with the Sculptor Charles Ray , The New Yorker
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• How do Charles Ray's sculptures take shape, if flesh has been denied to them? How do they become images that bring life to a space? Do these non-characters share a sculptural armature with the psyche of the viewer? On the occasion of his exhibition at Matthew Marks Gallery in New York City last spring (5th May-16th June), the artist reflected on statuary history and envisaged his œuvre as a portal into his mind - placid on the outside but spinning furiously on the inside.   What is sculpture to you? Or, if it makes it any easier, what is a ...
  September 2018 Massimiliano Gioni and Charles Ray, Charles Ray, A geological take on time , Artpress
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• WALDEN, N.Y. — The Los Angeles sculptor Charles Ray woke up at 5 a.m. and walked for four hours, as he does every day, both for his health and for solitary reflection time. Only he was in New York City at the time, so he used Central Park. Energized, he got into a car and came up here to the Polich Tallix foundry in Orange County, to see some men about a lion and a dog. Mr. Ray, who is known for his mysterious figural sculptures that “circle ancient themes and conventions,” as Roberta Smith wrote in a review, was finishing his ...
  May 14, 2018 Ted Loos, A Sculpture Gnaws, And Spectators Feel It , The New York Times
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• “Like Life: Sculpture, Color, and the Body,” at the Met Breuer, is a mind-blowing show in good and, while not bad, pestiferous ways: hypercharged with sensation and glutted with instruction. I am torn between praising it as visionary (and also a great deal of fun, what with entertainments including a voluble animatronic savant) and reporting it as a mugging to the taste police. I guess I’ll do both. A hundred and twenty-seven almost exclusively European and American renditions of human bodies, from very old to recent and from masterpieces to curios, elaborate the thesis that colored figurative sculpture has been ...
  April 2, 2018 Peter Schjeldahl, Living Color , The New Yorker
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• A year ago, the Whitney Museum of American Art inaugurated its new downtown home with a permanent-collection showcase called "America Is Hard to See." Its successor, the even more immediately engaging "Human interest: Portraits from the Whitney's Collection," is now on view. Astutely geared to the selfie age, it might well have been subtitled "Americans are Strange to Look At," which, in the 250 images here, we sure are: funny-strange, beautiful-strange, crazy-strange, dangerous-strange, inscrutable-strange. Spread over two floors, the display of paintings, photographs and drawings reconfirms the richness – and  the geographical limitations of the Whitney's holdings. And while pointing ...
  April 29, 2016 Holland Cotter, Portraits of America In the Selfie Age , The New York Times
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• I recently visited “Picasso Sculpture” at the Museum of Modern Art and was surprised by how taken I was with “Woman With Leaves” (1934). It’s a small figurative work, and it easily could be overlooked in the exhibition, as it’s placed in a room full of larger and more imposing sculptures. It’s a scrappy little piece made of dingy cast-plaster forms assembled and stacked into a figure of a woman. At first glance it is so Picassoesque that you almost need go no further: Assembled forms becoming parts of another whole. The relation of one to the other is charming and easily understood. But if you stop and ...
  February 6 - 7, 2016 Charles Ray, Making and Looking , The Wall Street Journal
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• Hello. This is Charles Ray. I want to tell you a story that’s really quite scary. I hike every morning in the predawn hours. I do this for health reasons. I get up at 3:30 to be on the trailhead by 4:10–4:15. It’s very dark at that hour, and during certain times of year it stays dark even after I finish my hike and am at home in my kitchen. I find it necessary for several reasons to carry a flashlight. The light not only illuminates the rocky trail, but is also a protective bubble, warning people and animals that I am about. I’ve gone through ...
  Winter 2016 Charles Ray, A Questionnaire on Materialisms , October
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• No artist of his generation takes up space like Charles Ray, even when he sticks to a single sculpture in a room. Like many of the most important sculptors before him, size, scale and space have been core concerns of his since the late 1980s, and he has kept his investigations of them idiosyncratic and unpredictable by taking his time. In all of my years of seeing many of his exhibitions, I don’t remember a circumstance in which he claimed space as a power grab. Instead, Ray regards space more as a topic of discussion, a philosophical dialogue or debate, orchestrated ...
  September 2015 Terry R. Myers, Charles Ray: Sculpture, 1997-2014 , The Seen
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• Alexander Nagel (Rail): Recently I was reading a book about Michelangelo’s David where the scholar wonders why Michelangelo showed him as a fully grown young man, rather than as a prepubescent boy, the way Donatello and Verrocchio represent the figure. And my thought was: Really? What would a prepubescent boy look like as a fourteen-foot-tall statue? I thought, I must ask Charley what he thinks about this.  Charles Ray: Alex, I have been trying to respond to your question in a simple and clear manner, but the problem you mention has run away with the question of what would a fourteen-foot prepubescent boy look like. I think ...
  September 8, 2015 Charles Ray with Alexander Nagel, Michelangelo’s David (1504), Antico’s (Pier Jacopo Alari Bonacolsi) Spinario (ca. 1500), and the Spinario (ca. 50 BCE) , The Brooklyn Rail
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• Over the past 40 years, Charles Ray has produced a majestic array of artistic touchstones within the contemporary sculptural vernacular. His orchestrated relationships between space and objects tempt the senses and baffle perceptual longings. Ray’s sculptures are the result of deeply considered compositions often requiring extraordinary amounts of labor, sometimes years in the making. Ray's sculptural idioms question our basic ontology. He employs the power of awkward bodily relationships, which result in confrontational moments between work and viewer. He deploys a serious wit and, over the years, has engaged in an enormous amount of material inquiry. For many makers and admirers ...
  July - August 2015 Joshua Reiman and Charles Ray, The Space In Between , Sculpture Magazine
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• Artists often turn to older art as a guidepost in developing new work. And why not? All art has a contemporary dimension, since it's chattering away today as surely as the day it was made, even if that was centuries ago. Listening to past art is simply a sensible thing to do. Sometimes, though, the places in which an artist chooses to look are surprising. For well over a dozen years, Los Angeles-based sculptor Charles Ray has been looking closely at the art of antiquity. Carved reliefs from ancient Mesopotamia, mythical beings from Periclean Athens and Hellenistic Greece and heroic ...
  June 14, 2015 Christopher Knight, Antiquity Cast with a Modern Sheen , The Los Angeles Times
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• Charles Ray, one of today’s most critically admired sculptors, has since the 1970s produced an extraordinarily varied oeuvre whose common thread has been a preoccupation with reality and illusion. Since the late 1990s, he has been creating works of terrific technical ambition and sometimes controversial subject matter. For “Charles Ray: Sculpture 1997-2014,” the Art Institute of Chicago has devoted the 18,000 square feet of its second floor Modern Wing to just 17 pieces, affording lots of breathing room for each. “Horse and Rider” (2014), a full-scale equestrian self-portrait, will be displayed elsewhere in the museum. It’s one of four works ...
  May 24, 2015 Ken Johnson, Exploring the Real and the Unreal , The New York Times
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• Charles Ray is a disturbing presence in contemporary art. Famous but little known, an artist who can work on a sculpture for ten years and then wait several more before showing it, he is so far from the mainstream that we sometimes forget he’s here. Ray, who is sixty-one, has been unusually productive in the past decade. When I visited his studio in Santa Monica last fall, I counted more than a dozen sculptural models or fragments in various sizes and stages of development. Some of them were being worked on by one or more of his fifteen assistants. Others—a ...
  May 11, 2015 Calvin Tomkins, Meaning Machines, the sculptures of Charles Ray , The New Yorker
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• The sculptor of labor-intensive tours de force springs two new stunners. “Baled Truck” (2014), six years in the making, is a full-scale rendition of a trash-compacted pickup truck, carved from a thirteen-ton solid block of softly gleaming stainless steel. Its mass astounds. The faithfully represented, violent details—squashed, buckled, creased, dimpled—feel reverential, like the preparation for burial of a back-roads god. “Girl on Pony” (2015), a seven-foot-high aluminum low relief, is charming in image but likewise funereal in aura, with the doleful tenderness of Hellenic tomb art. Ray is our compelling neoclassicist master, whose will to rival ancient infusions of the ...
  February 23, 2015 Goings On About Town, Charles Ray , The New Yorker
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• With "Sculpture After Sculpture," Stockholm's Moderna Museet staged one of the most suggestive presentations of contemporary sculpture I can remember seeing: a show brilliantly choreographed as both an experience and an argument. Few exhibitions manage to bring the two together; where "Sculpture After Sculpture" out-paced the ordinary offering was in its success in materializing its thesis as an installation, an orchestration of objects in space. Picture a presentation of just thirteen objects: no filler, no extras-- just an encounter, straight up. Such a display follows from Minimalism, certainly, but also from postmodernism, though it is not mortgaged to either. Both this ...
  February 2015 Anne M. Wagner, Sculpture After Sculpture , Artforum
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• Moderna Museets stora höstutsällning heter "Skulptur efter skulptur". I den möter vi tre konstnärer som omformulerade skulpturbegreppet far 1970-taler och framåt, Katharina Fritsch (född 1956), Jeff Koons (född 1955) och Charles Ray (född 1953). Charles Ray är kanske den som är minst känd för en svensk publik. Han slog igenom i början av 70-talet och har sedan dess rört sig fritt mellan olika stilar, uttryck och media. Från användandet av sig själv som en del i skulpturen, som "Plank Piece" (1973), och minimalistiska former på 80-talet, till modeller av en naken amerikansk kärnfamilj där alla är lika långa, med den ...
  October 2014 Johan Deurell, Charles Ray , Artlover
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• Charles Ray's elegant exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Basel and Museum für Gegenwarskunst "Sculpture, 1997-2014," turned on one question: Is he classical? It seems strange to ask this about an artist who spent the 1980s inserting his own scruffy body into minimalist oblongs, before lending the trauma-obsessed early '90s such key sculpture as Fall '91, 1992, an eight-foot-tall mannequin in a poisonous-pink skirt suit. Yet certain aspects of the latter's more modest counterpart in basel, Aluminum Girl, 2003 -- Her creamy skin, stern cheekbones, hairless vulva, and orb-like eyes -- are undeniably classical, although not in Jeff Koons's Caesars Palace sense. ...
  October 2014 Andrei Pop, Charles Ray, Kunstmuseum Basel and Museum für Gegenwartkunst , Artforum
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• Nel severo museo Ragazzo con la rana, 2009, il Kouros dei nostri giorni in acciaio dipinto di bianco, se ne sta lì al primo piano, in una sala apposita, apollineo e indifferente alle polemiche che lo hanno levato dall’originaria Punta della Dogana a Venezia. È la star d’una mostra importante: 15 opere dal 1997 a oggi, che il Kunstmuseum dedica a Charles Ray, il famoso artista americano (Chicago 1953) che in polemica con l’astrazione del ’900, esplora i fondamenti della scultura, tema, materiali, dimensioni, rappresentazione, ritornando alla tradizione classica e al realismo, ma aggiornati ai modi e alle ricerche di ...
  September 1, 2014 Fiorella Minervino, Ray, oltre il ragazzo con la rana , La Stampa
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• The Kunstmuseum Basel, in collaboration with Museum für Gegenwartskunst, is currently showing a relevant exhibition of the works of US artist Charles Ray (Skulpturen 1997 – 2014, through 28 September 2014). The exhibit focuses the artist’s sculptural oeuvre from the last decade. Relevant why? For whom? Because of the caliber of the artist or the show’s location? I would like to say both. Charles Ray (1953), born in Chicago and living in Los Angeles, is one of the most interesting established living artists on the contemporary sculptural scene. His biography is long enough to tell us the international resonance of ...
  August 15, 2014 Patrik Alvarez, Charles Ray in Basel , Green Apfel
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• Schultheater auf dem Treppenabsatz. Knabe mit Tunika und Kurzschwert. Edelstahl massiv. Man ist Kaum angekommen in der Basler Ausstellung des amerikanishen Bildhauers Charles Ray und hat schon ein erstes erstarrtes Bild, das einem nicht mehr aus dem Kopf geht. Später schleicht man um den fiberglasnachbau eines Crash-Autos herum und bückt sich zu einem nackten Mann hinunter, der so tut, als schnürte er sich die Schuhe zu. Nebenan wurde ein alter Traktor aufgebaut, dessen Schrottteile die Assistenten mit unterschiedlicher Akkuratesse in Aluminum nachgeformt haben. Man sucht noch eine Weile nach dem Code, mit dem sich das Programm entschlüsseln ließe, und gibt ...
  August 2014 Hans-Joachim Müller, In Basel macht Charles Ray das Denken mobil , Monopol
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• I have never been to Bolton Landing, but as long as I have known of the work of David Smith I have been aware that this is where he made his sculptures. It's not just a location but also a place with a temporal dimension. You can drive from New York City to Lake George and find the town of Bolton Landing. From there, make your way to Edgecomb Pond Road, and the Location of the studio and house will be apparent. This is due to memories of numerous photos taken by Smith of his sculptures in the surrounding fields. ...
  2014 Charles Ray, There Is No Color in the Great Outdoors , Raw Color: The Circles of David Smith
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• Der amerikanische Künstler Charles Ray schafft eine Form von Skulptur, die ebenso in der Klassik wie in der Gegen- wart verankert ist. Das Kunstmuseum Basel zeigt eine perfekt inszenierte Schau seines enigmatischen Werks. «Eines Tages, auf dem Weg ins Atelier, fand ich eine kleine Action-Figur auf der Strasse. Einen Muskelmann, aber ohne Kopf. In Kalifornien hatte soeben eine ausserordentliche Gouverneurswahl stattgefunden, bei der Gray Davis abgewählt und Arnold Schwarzenegger ins Amt gewählt worden war. Die kleine Figur namens Warrior Giant schien die Situation zu kommentieren.» Charles Ray liess das Fundstück auf sich wirken. Nach einiger Zeit modellierte er die Figur ...
  July 23, 2014 Maria Becker, Leicht wie ein Schlaf , Neuö Zürcör Zäitung
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• Contemporary art suffered a major blow when Charles Ray’s sculpture Boy With Frog, 2009, was removed from Punta della Dogana in Venice. When the city council failed to renew the permit for the site-specific sculpture, which was commissioned by François Pinault, major art-world figures including the curator Francesco Bonami and the critic Jerry Saltz were outraged—but to no avail. The tip of the island, where the Grand Canal meets the Giudecca, is now adorned by a 19th-century lamp-post. Ironically, Ray’s 8ft-tall, stark-white, naturalistic sculpture could have been misconstrued as one of the Classical works that the city council prefers.  Making its ...
  June 19, 2014 Laurie Rojas, Classical allusions given a contemporary twist , The Art Newspaper
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• Shortly after Anthony Caro died last fall, I proposed a moratorium on the phrase "I really like his early work." In the context of Caro, this sentiment is generated from our taste rather than from a deeper understanding of his sculptures. The figuration from the '50s is not included in my moratorium, and to many this period of his oeuvre serves more as a footnote to his beginnings. Understanding the intent behind these potent bronze figures allows us to step forward with the artist, grasping the potentiality and originality of works like Twenty Four Hours, 1960, Midday, 1960 and Early ...
  February 2014 Michael Fried, Charles Ray, Anthony Caro 1924-2013 , Artforum
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• Museum exhibitions are asking about the direction of photography in an era when cameras and lenses are optional. At first glance, viewers of "What Is a Photograph?" opening Friday at the International Center of Photography, will not even recognize the work on the wall as photographic. There is no easily identifiable subject, no clear representational form. "The show does not answer the question," said Carol Squiers, the show's curator. "It poses the question. It is an open question, and that's why I find this period in photography so exciting." Ms. Squiers pointed to Travess Smalley, who cuts shapes from magazine ...
  January 26, 2014 Philip Gefter, The Next Big Picture , The New York Times
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• Charles Ray talks with Zachary Cahill about how sculpture constitutes an intersection between actual space and states of mind. A differential is an automotive part that allows two wheels on the same axle to run at varying speeds. A sculptural differential might thus be a useful metaphor, not only for considering sculpture itself, but also as a device with which to "think sculpturally," as Ray would put it. zachary cahill: let's start with why you chose flowers for your drawings. charles ray: They're colorful. I use them as an instant armature to engage with color, indulge in color. For me ...
  December 2013 Zachary Cahill, A Sculptural Differential , Mousse
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• Chris Burden's breakthrough perforance pieces, such as Shoot and Prelude to 220, or 110, both 1971, still unsettle our complacent acceptance of the status quo--a jolt that can make us overlook the delicate balance of elements at play in his work. The New Museum's building-wide retrospective will offer a great opportunity to contemplate an impressive cross section of this influential art's oeuvre. Burden turns a sharp visual eye on the broader social context of the artwork to simultaneously dissect and upend the figure-ground relationship that society idealizes even at the basic level of law and order, thereby bringing the backdrop ...
  September 2013 Charles Ray, Chris Burden: Extreme Measures , Artforum
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• They park their hulking yachts with names like "Lady Nag Nag," "Wall's Love" and "Sea Force One" on the choppy waters of the lagoon just outside the main entrance to the Venice Biennale. Every two years, scores of superrich collectors arrive here by sea, joined by museum directors, curators, artists and auction-house experts. They come to see and be seen and to take the temperature of contemporary art today. But amid the glamorous parties and the people-watching - celebrities like Elton John and Tilda Swinton were here, along with Milla Jovovich, who performed in a glass box atop a byzantine-style ...
  June 4, 2013 Carol Vogel, Ripples of rumination , International Herald Tribune
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• Venice -- La città si prepara all'inaugurazione della Biennale, aperta al pubblico dal 1° giugno, con uno stravagante ballo delle mascherine. È sparita dalla Punta della Salute il «Bambino con la rana» dell'americano Charles Ray. Era un pupazzone candido che il magnate francese Pinault aveva fatto collocare in occasione della riapertura di Punta della Dogana come luogo d'esposizione delle sue enormi e stravaganti collezioni d'arte (il vernissage della prossima esposizione, «Materia prima», è fissato per domani sera con vasto parterre di star system). Era «provvisorio»; ma come tutto il provvisorio in Italia era diventato un «quasidefinitivo». Misteri della burocrazia? La ...
  May 28, 2013 Pierluigi Panza, Venezia tra sculture di plastica e lanterne inizio '900 , Corriere della sera
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• Venezia fa infuriare New York per un ragazzo con la rana. Oggi, a Punta della Dogana, viene rimossa Boy with frog, la scultura in acciaio bianco alta due metri e mezzo dell'artista di Chicago Charles Ray. Il Comune non ha rinnovato il permesso di esposizione temporaneo dell'opera che era lì dal 2009, anno di apertura del museo della Fondazione Pinault a cui la statua appartiene. A occupare lo spazio sarà la copia del lampione di ghisa ottocentesco che c' era in origine. Nel pieno rispetto del regolamento e di qualche protesta dei cittadini. Ma non tutti sono d' accordo.
  May 7, 2013 Dario Pappalardo, La rana che fa litigare Venezia e New York , La Repubblica
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• Parrebbe l'ultimo dei nostri problemi. Qualcuno ha chiesto e ottenuto la rimozione di una scultura dalla Punta della Dogana, a Venezia. Al suo posto verrà rimesso il lampione ch’era stato rimosso in via provvisoria nel 2009. Il motivo della richiesta è semplice. La scultura, che ritrae in modo realistico un bambino che afferra una rana, è un segno troppo sfacciatamente moderno per poter rimanere troppo a lungo nel cuore della Venezia monumentale. Stride. Nell’anno in cui tutto pare caderci addosso come macigni, questo parrebbe essere l’ultimo dei nostri problemi. La rimozione anticipata di una scultura dallo spazio pubblico di una ...
  April 29, 2013 Anthony Louis Marasco, L'ultimo dei nostri problemi , Centro Einaudi
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• Egregio Bonami, sono il veneziano «doc» che lotta dal 2009 per il Lampione («Chi ha paura di una scultura?» su La Stampa di ieri in prima pagina, ndr). Dal suo ritorno si spera che finalmente la città, forse, non verrà amministrata più con le deroghe, ma con le regole. Qui si tratta di diritti e non di arte: questo specificano Franco Miracco e il sottoscritto. Ma le migliaia di Veneziani che rivogliono il lampione, amano l’arte e la propria città, al di là di rane che hanno garantito guardie giurate a propria difesa rendendo di fatto un pezzo pubblico della ...
  April 25, 2014 Manuel Vecchina, Francesco Bonami, Venezia, perche lampione e non rana , La Stampa
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• Che nessun partito o gruppo politico abbia prestato attenzione nel proprio programma alla voce «cultura», sia come «bene culturale» sia come «produzione culturale», era già una cosa molto grave, ma di questi tempi meravigliarsi dello stato dell’arte, politica o meno, è un po’ da ingenui. Certo però rimane difficile non scandalizzarsi davanti alla notizia, appena confermata dallo stesso artista, Charles Ray, che il famoso e fotografatissimo Ragazzo con la rana, la scultura che dal 2009 ha cambiato il paesaggio di Venezia in cima a Punta della Dogana, nel giro di pochi giorni dovrà fare le valigie. Il Comune non gli ...
  March 24, 2013 Francesco Bonami, Venezia, chi ha paura di una rana? , La Stampa
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• Over the past 30-plus years, Charles Ray has produced successive bodies of sculpture that superficially appear quite different from one another. There have been works performed for the camera that employed the artist's own body as a sculptural element. There have been conceptual variations on minimalist forms: a line that is a continuous stream of ink flowing from a hole in the ceiling to a hole in the floor; a cube that is a black-painted steel box open at the top and filled to the brim with black ink; and a circle that is a mechanized white disc set flush ...
  February 2013 Anne Doran, Charles Ray at Matthew Marks , Art in America
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• For more than five years now, Charles Ray has been making sculptures based closely on the human figure, somewhat in the manner of his first work of this type, Aluminum Girl, 2003. In his 2007 show at Matthew Marks Gallery, another such piece, The New Beetle, 2007, depicted, if that is the work, a naked young boy seated directly on the ground playing with a small model of a volkswagen. Since then, Ray has been mining this vein in a number of works, three of which, all dated 2012, made up his recent exhibition in the same gallery. The first ...
  February 2013 Michael Fried, Charles Ray, Matthew Marks Gallery , Artforum
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• Umberta Genta: Do you have an obsessive personality? I can't help wondering about it when I look at the extreme perfection of your work. Charles Ray: I would say someone might say that I was obsessive, but really I am not. I have discipline and persistence. Obsession is undisciplined and mindless, two qualities that are out of place in a good artwork -- or any work, for that matter. UG: does your meticulous approach manifest itself in your daily life? CR: It depends upon what vantage
  January - February 2013 Umberta Genta, Charles Ray: Using Time , Flash Art
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• A few years ago, Los Angeles-based artist Charles Ray had heart trouble that required surgery. After he recovered, one of his doctors told him that he should start walking as much as possible. "So I was taking these really long walks," he told The Observer last week at the Matthew Marks Gallery in Chelsea, where an exhibition of his work has just gone on view. Every day, he said, he would find himself walking by the same bench at the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Seventh Street, in Santa Monica, "and usually a homeless guy was on it, and I ...
  November 26, 2012 Andrew Russeth, Shoeless Ray: Charles Ray, Contemporary Art’s Most Obsessive Perfectionist, Has a New Show at Matthew Marks , The New York Observer
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• Figurative sculpture is almost as old as the human body but also as new as whatever fresh materials, techniques and meanings artists can rally to their cause. The latest confirmation of this comes from Charles Ray's new forays into post-Conceptual realism, three works based on actual people (but 10 percent larger) and carved by computer driven machines from solid stainless steel. Luminous rather than reflective, they form a beautifully spare arrangement in Matthew Marks's large, nearly empty gallery and produce a cat's cradle of richocheting ideas. Their solidity is not immediately apparent, but they sure don't seem hollow.
  November 23, 2012 Roberta Smith, Art in Review, Charles Ray , The New York Times
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• Pythagoras was as global as one could be. He met all the Who that were Who in those days (6th century BC). He was a giant. He had Charisma, Warmth, and Charm galore. Star qualities! They were quieter times. You could hear yourself think. Pythagoras dug music. He took time to design the Octave and the Fifth. He figured out how we would sing to the Gods and each other, by codifying the modes.
  spring 2012 Van Dyke Parks, Memphis Musicaux , TAR magazine
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• Known for realistic sculptures of oversize children and incredibly detailed recreations of smashed cars and fallen trees, Charles Ray has made a career out of playing with our perceptions. Two new sculptures at Matthew Marks are no exception, evoking classical statuary and confounding assumptions about materials. Each work depicts a life size figure. One is a man whom Ray made a cast of about 10 years ago; the other is a woman he photographed sleeping on the street.
  May 11, 2012 Sharon Mizota, Visual links to the past , Los Angeles Times
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• If I did not have this computer, the floor of my office would look like a John Chamberlain exhibition, scattered with crumpled-up sheets of paper to remind me of the false starts I have made in writing this short essay. Like this imagined office floor, my appreciation of Chamberlain's work has been littered with false starts and misunderstandings. Perhaps my greatest misconception of Chamberlain's sculptures comes from their entanglement with recent American cultural history.
  February 24, 2012 Charles Ray, Soft Future , Guggenheim Museum
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• Mr. Pinault asked me to make a big sculpture for the point of the Dogana. I might have made it anyway. I had already begun to think about the piece, although not in its totality, and it's related to The New Beetle (2006). But when Mr. Pinault talked to me about the project, all of my thinking came together. I can never separate the production of the work from its creation. It's not like I have this idea and then we go build it.
  2011 Paul Schimmel, Ray, Charles , In Praise Of Doubt
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• The newest work of magic here is American artist Charles Ray's eight-foot-high white painted steel boy examining a frog pulled, as it were, from the lagoon. Boy with Frog was made specifically for the point on the quay of the rehabilitated 17th-century customs house Punta della Dogana, François Pinault's vast new art museum. The Punta della Dogana and the Palazzo Grassi from the François Pinault Foundation, twin spaces devoted to exhibiting the massive contemporary art collection belonging to the French luxury–goods magnate.
  Summer 2011 Matthew Rose, Venice's Contemporary Masterpieces , InCircle Entrée
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• Formally, the psychological effects of Trotman's manipulation of scale link him to Charles Ray, whose sculptures include Fall '91 (1992), an intimidating eight-foot-high businesswoman who towers over viewers, and Family Romance (1993), a four-member family group in which all figures, from toddler to father, are presented naked and the same size, subtly altering their interrelationships.
  November 7, 2010 Linda Johnson Dougherty, Bob Trotman: Inverted Utopias , North Carolina Museum of Art
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• It's 5:45 A.M. At Charles Ray's request, I'm making my way toward the cabin at the entrance of Temescal Canyon Park. Moments later Charley - as he prefers to be called - arrives in his silver Prius. He takes me to the beginning of the looping five-mile trail he climbs every morning. The trail begins in the woods and it's still moonlight this early in the day. Feelings of wonder and fear lie at every turn. As we work our way uphill our eyes adjust as night slowly turns to day. The gold California light leaks over the mountaintops and ...
  spring - summer 2011 Alex Israel, Charles Ray , Purple Fashion Magazine
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• Eli Broad. Broad, a multibillionaire who made his money in the decidedly unglamorous businesses of tract housing and insurance, is the Lorenzo de’ Medici of Los Angeles—the city’s singular patron, especially of the arts. On the evening of November 13th, nine hundred of the city’s wealthier citizens and many of its most celebrated artists joined Broad at the Museum of Contemporary Art, on Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles. It was MOCA’s second fund-raising gala since Broad bailed out the nearly insolvent museum, in December, 2008.
  December 6, 2010 Connie Bruck, The Art of the Billionaire , The New Yorker
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• I have an unfortunate tendency to fall asleep during movies. Often I don’t make it through a title sequence without my wife elbowing me to stop my snoring. For this reason, it was really great to see “The Spectacular Art of Jean-Léon Gérôme” at the Getty Center this summer: Paintings of Roman arenas, slave girls, boys with snakes, and dignitaries from Siam awoke me to the splendors of a Hollywood screen. An additional bonus for Los Angeles (a city that loves its art professors) was the exhibition at LACMA of sporting images by Thomas Eakins. While Gérôme’s gladiators and bloodied ...
  December 2010 Charles Ray, The Artists' Artists , Artforum
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• La polemica Troppi i venerati maestri che hanno fatto fortuna grazie al cattivo gusto e all'ignornza del pubblico. Un grande critico spiega come smascherare chi bluffa, passando ai raggi x l opere di mostri sacri. Da Morandi a Picasso, fino a Bill Viola, Charles Ray e Julian Schnabel. Ci sono sculture tarocche e quadri falsi, ma e possible che esistano anche artisti tarocchi che fanno quadri e sculture vere? Possibilissimo. Come Capirlo? Non e semplicissimo ma possiamo provarci.
  June 5, 2010 Francesco Bonami, Arte Contemporanea Chi Ci E E Chi Ci Fa , Panorama
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• Charles Ray's wizardry with boundary-breaking was conspicuous in this low-tech but high-interest exhibition. Three works from a little more than 20 years ago defied ceiling, floor and wall, showing the viewer how simple interventions can result in sculptures of startling intelligence and rough beauty. In each piece, Ray conceals a motor or pump that causes the sculpture to do what it does, but his instruments, while concealed, feel rudimentary. Ray is a thoroughly classical postmodern sculptor, if such a characterization makes sense. He creates one-off pieces that range widely without necessarily relating closely to each other - for example, there ...
  April 2010 Jonathan Goodman, New York: Charles Ray , Sculpture
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• The art world is peculiarly suited to dramatize a problem, or at least a syndrome, of the present day: that of abominable wealth, by which I mean the effect of huge fortunes on people who don’t have them. The global tide of prosperity that rose in the past decade has, in receding, stranded most boats that aren’t ocean liners. This condition pertains with special poignance to a sphere in which the rich (collectors, patrons) and the relatively poor (artists, intellectuals) intermingle. The Greek billionaire Dakis Joannou, whose fabulous holdings of contemporary art are sampled in a controversial show with a ...
  March 15, 2010 Peter Schjeldahl, Big Time , The New Yorker
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• The cover of the 2010 Whitney Biennial catalogue displays a picture of Barack Obama as a Dapper Dan cowboy. Inside, guest curator Francesco Bonami and co-curator Gary Carrion-Murayari call the president “the coolest artist of all” and say their show is about “innovative forms,” “new relationships,” and “personal modernism.” After two biennials devoted to dealing with “failure” and “darkness,” this catalogue speaks of “renewal” and “optimism.” Yes, it’s the Obama Biennial: alternately moving and frustrating, challenging and disappointing—and a big improvement on what came before.
  March 8, 2010 Jerry Saltz, Change We Can Believe In , New York Magazine
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• For me, the most arresting work in the Whitney Biennial is, not for the first time, by Charles Ray. The California creator of aesthetically potent oddities rattled the 1989 Biennial with a disk shaped section of wall that inconspicuously rotated at fantastic speed; the 1993 Biennial, with a veristic sculpture of a naked family of four, all the size of its young son, and a life-size plastic toy fire engine, parked out on Madison Avenue; and the 1995 edition, with a wooden, carved and painted, full-length self-portrait in a clear-glass bottle.
  March 8, 2010 Peter Schjeldahl, No Offense , The New Yorker
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• The Whitney finally figures out how to put on a Biennial. Over the years, the Whitney Biennial has been described variously as "the Oscars of the art world" and "the show everybody loves to hate." but neither description seems to fit anymore, given the diminishing returns in the past decade by sucessive iterations of this biannual showcase of contemporary art. Perhaps "Golden Globes of the art world," or "the show everyone pays lip service to but nobody quite knows why," would be more suitable, though in a perfect world, the Biennial would be retired. That'll never happen, of course,
  March 4, 2010 Howard Halle, Art Reviews: 2010 Whitney Biennal , Time Out New York
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• Charles Ray is one of a dozen Los Angeles based artists participating in the 2010 Whitney Biennial opening Thursday in New York, but he's the only one making his fifth appearance since 1989 in the important exhibition of contemporary American Art. Among his memorable entries were 1993's "Firetruck," 12-by-47-foot replica of a toy fire truck "parked" outside the museum, and his "Family Romance," which he described as "a nuclear family' - four nude fiberglass figures holding hands now in the collection of New York's Museum of Modern Art. Last spring, his 8-foot-tall sculpture of a boy dangling a frog, aptly ...
  February 21, 2010 Irene Lacher, Festival frame of mind , Los Angeles Times
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• Con il restauro ell'architetto giapponese Tadao Ando, l'antico edicicio diventato il nuovo spazio espositivo della Fondazione Pinault Per secoli e stato il primo approccio alla Serenissima per gli stranieri che arrivavano via mare nelbacino marciano e, per i mercanti veneziani, il luogo familiare che da lontano indicava la via del ritorno, il termine del viaggio. Con la sua posizione strategica sulla punta dell'isola di Dorsoduro, alla confluenza tra il canale della Giudecca e il Canal Grande e in faccia a San Marco, Punta Della Dogana e sempre stata un luogo emblematico, che nemmeno trent'anni di abbandono hanno offuscato. Oggi si ...
  September 2009 Sandra Minute, L'Arte Non Paga Dazio , Bell'Italia
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• The Punta Della Dogana is a protrusion of land that jut out at the southern entrance of Venice's Grand Canal. Its name, which means "Customs Point," refers to an earlier function of the spot: Serving as venice's chief maritime portal. it was the location of the city's sea customs for four centuries. As a site historically given over to the task of deciding what may or may not enter, the Punta would provide any collector a powerful venue for putting his aesthetic criteria on display. The customs building is especially appropriate for Francois Pinault, the French billionaire whose private collection ...
  September 2009 Sarah K. Rich, Port Authority , Artforum
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• Quest'estate Venezia è la capitale mondiale dell'arte contemporanea. È stata inaugurata Punta della Dogana, con la faraonica collezione di François Pinault. Poco distante, ai Magazzini del Sale, le grandi tele di Emilio Vedova scorrono appese a un binario fissato sull'alto soffitto, smistate da un computer-capostazione, poi tornano a immagazzinarsi roboticamente sul fondo della sala. Si rimescolano come un mazzo di carte per una partita fra giganti in cui è di briscola il caos, o il solitario di un dio che collaudi le diverse combinazioni dell'informe prima della creazione. La Peggy Guggenheim Collection propone gli assemblaggi di scarti raccolti da Robert ...
  August 12, 2009 Tiziano Scarpa, Come pazza Venezia , Lespresso
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• Scarpe, scarpe. In fondo e questo il dilemma che accompagna tutte le signore planate a Venezia da ogni angolo del mondo per i vernissage chic in laguna. Al plurale: perche quest'anno sono stati inaugurati con grande clamore mediatico, moti bicchieri di prosecco e inviti a numero chiuso, due capolavori d'architettura. Ovvero il nuovo museo di Renzo Piano, dedicato a Vedova, e Punta della Dogana, a firma di Tadao Ando, che ospita la collezione Pinault.
  June 2009 Lisa Corva, Il lato glam della Biennale , Grazia
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• Nelle lunghe stanze rettangolari ripartite con una serie di pareti Parallele tra gli antichi muri in mattone e le capriate, in modo che dalle lunette e dai lucernai la vista possa spaziare a 360 gradi sul triangolo di cielo e mare fra la cima del Canal Grande e la punta del Canale della Giudecca, Pinault ha invitato i suoi artisti preferiti a innamorarsi del luogo: <> spiega Monique Veautem, direttrice del doppio museo veneziano Grassi/Punta Dogana<<in uno spazio cosi potente avrebbero potuto
  June 2, 2009 Melisa Garzonio, Lo spazio ideale per creare , Il Secolo XIX
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• I don't know how to express this idea without sounding overly romantic, but I like art with a little magic to it. The art world typically replaces the word "magic" with “mystery," a colder noun more likely to entice collectors than a term evoking rabbits and hats, but the latter term is not always appropriate. Mystery has certain perks, implying critical engagement, the desire and possibility of solving and figuring out the unknown; "Magic" doesn't offer this kind of triumphal resolution.
  July 6, 2009 Paddy Johnson, Magic vs. Mystery in the Art Worlds , The L Magazine
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• Venice is the perfect place for a phase of art to die. No other city on earth embraces entropy quite like this magical floating mall. There are now more than 100 biennales around the world (most of them put together by the same 25 celebrity curators, drawing from the same pool of 100 or so artists); Venice is often called “the most important” of them. The main show of this year’s Venice Biennale is the work of Daniel Birnbaum, a well-respected 46-year-old Swedish critic and curator. His “Making Worlds,” held in the Palazzo delle Esposizioni delle Biennale and in the ...
  June 19, 2009 Jerry Saltz, Entropy in Venice , New York Magazine
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• On a recent walk through Chelsea, I remembered a Steven Wright joke: "I've been doing a lot of abstract painting lately, extremely abstract. No brush, no paint, no canvas - I just think about it." Not a reaction to seeing rafts of abstract canvases, but rather a response to experiencing two exhibitions of realistic sculpture confected as antidotes to volumetric abstraction, the crack stuck with me as I took in the meticulously unsettling work of two foundational artists: Charles Ray and Duane Hanson.
  November 28 - December 4, 2007 Christian Viveros-Faune, The Anxiety of Realism , Village Voice
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• A legendary work by Ray, never before exhibited in public, may well be the damnedest think you ever saw. "Ink Line" (1987) is a gleaming, almost imperceptibly rippling filament of printer's ink continuously falling from a tiny hole in the ceiling into a tiny hole in the floor. Hymning absolute verticality (guaranteed by gravity), absolute blackness, and minimalist presence in overdrive, it rivets and even somehow, serenely, terrifies. Two other early motorized
  June 22, 2009 Charles Ray , The New Yorker
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• A quivering, slender, blue-black column extending from floor to ceiling, Charles Ray's Ink Line (1987) is ine of those rare works of art capable of provoking a double take, even in the forewarned viewer. Like Richard Wilson's 20:50, and audience favorite from the same year, Ink Line seems to transform the liquid from which it's made into something completely different. Whereas Wilson exploited reflective properties of oil to make a pool that vanishes into its surroundings, Ray leans on the opacity from a moving stream. Only a slight wobble, a gentle trickling sound and the presence of a nervous gallery ...
  June 18 - 24, 2009 Michael Wilson, Reviews: Charles Ray , Time Out New York
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• The New York Times art critic Ken Johnson is writing a book saying that “psychedelic drugs and psychedelic culture have had a deeper, less obvious influence on the art of the past 60 years than has generally been acknowledged.” Johnson doesn’t mean that the intermingling of art and drugs is new; they’ve probably been canoodling as long as both have been around. And his idea isn’t about artists who actually use drugs. Sober-looking work is made by stoners and addled-looking art is made by teetotalers. Van Eyck’s hyperreal paintings are among the most hallucinogenic works ever made. In some ways, ...
  June 15 - 22, 2009 Jerry Saltz, Dude, You’ve Gotta See This , New York Magazine
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• BASEL, Switzerland — There was a commotion on the second floor of Art Basel shortly after the fair opened here on Tuesday. Crowds gathered around a darkened alcove, listening with rapt attention to Pharrell Williams. This 36-year-old recording artist and producer wasn’t talking music, nor was he discussing his personal art collection, which includes paintings by Andy Warhol and Takashi Murakami. Rather, Mr. Williams, wearing a red-checked gingham shirt, a brown fedora and baggy blue jeans, was explaining a group of objects that had been carefully arranged in the open mouth of a whimsical fiberglass monster. “They’re the things in ...
  June 12, 2009 Carol Vogel, A Thriftier Lot Comes to Basel This Year , The New York Times
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• Le straordinarie architetture di Tadao Ando per Puna della Dogana. Non smette di rampare, aereo, l’imbalsamato cavallo araldico di Cattelan, chiave di volta dell’imponente zampata ottica del vasto atrio-chiostro della svelata Punta della Dogana. Sentendosi un poco, forse, un leone alato della Serenissima a capofitto entro una cupola muta di mattoni, nauseato ippogrifo ariostesco da machina ronconiana, la testa caparbiamente ficcata entro la parete, come a non badare a questo sudore mondano ed umano, che gli zampetta intorno, fremente. Sarebbe troppo corrivo osare la scorciatoia
  June 8, 2009 Marco Vallora, Le straordinarie architetture di Tadao Ando per Punta della Dogana , La Stampa
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• VENICE — This dazzling city got a new landmark this week, an eight-foot-tall sculpture of a boy holding a frog, by the American artist Charles Ray. Prominently situated outdoors on the very tip of the Punta della Dogana on the Grand Canal, it has already become a signpost for Venice’s newest contemporary art space. Two years ago François Pinault, the French luxury goods magnate and art collector who owns Christie’s, beat out the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation for the 17th-century Dogana, the former customs house, signing a 33-year agreement with the City of Venice to transform it into a gallery ...
  June 5, 2009 Carol Vogel, Frog in hand (worth two glances) , The New York Times
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• L'inaugurazione dell'altra sede di Palazzo Grassi ha un momento speciale quando Francois Pinault svela l'attesa e misteriosa opera da lui commissionata per Punta della Dogana, un luogo unico anche per Venezia, sospeso tra pietra e acqua, come la prua di un vascello che divide il Canal Grande dalla Giudecca. Ed ecco A Boy with a Frog, una scultura in acciaio bianco, un ragazzino che tiene in mano una rana, come mostrandola al mondo. L'opera e' di Charles Ray, da vent'anni uno dei piu' importanti artisti sulla scena contemporanea, ed e' una piccola
  June 4, 2009 Camerana Benedetto, ''La mia rana da' la scossa a Venezia" Camerana intervista Charles Ray , La Stampa
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• It's easy to understand why Alison Gingeras, the curator of French billionaire François Pinault's art collection, suggests we meet at the bar of the Monaco Hotel in Venice. The view from the hotel terrace over to Dogana del Mare, the 17th-century customs house across the Grand Canal, is spectacular. La Dogana, as the building will now be known, is also where Gingeras has worked night and day for the last six weeks. Timed to coincide with the opening of the Venice Biennale, it will throw open its doors later this week. Rewind to spring 2001, when Pinault, who built a ...
  June 3, 2009 Agnès Poirier , How the French Charles Saatchi became the merchant of Venice , The Guardian
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• VENICE — This week the art-world tsunami is crashing down here for the 53rd Biennale, which opens to the public June 7 and runs through November 22. Hoteliers and restaurateurs of this extremely impractical but unique city are not so keen about the art hordes, made of people who want to pay less and stay longer, Still, the Biennale crowd does elevate the atmosphere around here, which is usually filled with backpackers and package-tour-goers, who today, during the press preview, are getting jammed up at the Ponte dei Sospiri. The bridge is curently covered up with ugly advertising courtesy of the ...
  June 3, 2009 Francesco Bonami, For the Moment , T Magazine online
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• VENICE, Italy (Reuters) - Venice's latest contemporary art gallery will open to the public on Saturday after nearly two years of building work and anticipation. The Punta della Dogana on the tip of La Serenissima's Grand Canal will house major works from the vast catalog of Francois Pinault, a French luxury goods billionaire who has one of the world's largest collections of contemporary art. Pinault, ranked as the world's 41st richest man according to Forbes magazine, already displays a series of his works at the grandiose Palazzo Grassi which he owns on the Grand Canal. But the new Dogana aims ...
  June 2, 2009 Eliza Apperly, Venice set for summer of art as new gallery opens , Reuters
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• In "There Will Be Blood", il futuro magnate Daniel Plainview ha un attimo di rapace bellezza, ed a quando si accorge per la prima volta che la libertae un bene primario, il motore di qualsiasi sfida etica e morale. Non e l'indice di un comportamento, sicuramente non lo pensa Uptown Sinclair quandosrive "Oil!" nel 1927, perche Plainview di mestiere cerca petrolio e la sua visione epica dello scontro fra uomini e compressa tra la fortuna di trivellare nuovi affari. Ma la bellezza, comunque, levita intorno: la natura incontaminata, l ruvida austerita dei contadini, le preghiere per salvare il raccolto e ...
  June 2, 2009 Renalto Tortarolo, Una Finestra sull'arte , Il Secolo
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• On certain nights, the California Yacht Club in Marina del Rey can feel like a gathering of the American Institute of Architects. There, out on the patio, is Frank Gehry with a couple of people from his office. At another table, Greg Lynn is knocking back a few beers after a race with the artist Casey Reas and some other fellow faculty members from the U.C.L.A. School of Arts and Architecture. Men who spend their days dreaming up monolithic buildings — or, in the case of the artist and sailor Charles Ray, 18-ton sculptures in solid machined steel — would
  Spring 2009 Alix Browne, Love for sail , The New York Times Style Magazine
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• More than 20 years ago, Charles Ray created a piece of kinetic sculpture that became famous even though hardly anyone saw it: “Ink Line” (1987), a fine stream of black ink flowing from a little hole in the ceiling to another in the floor. Now it is publicly exhibited for the first time. “Ink Line” is a one-liner — a joke about Minimalism — but it is remarkable nevertheless. It looks like a length of shiny black rubber, but on closer examination, you can see that it is moving. Invisibly, below the floor, the ink is collected and pumped back ...
  May 15, 2009 Ken Johnson, Art in review: Charles Ray , The New York Times
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• More than 20 years ago, Charles Ray created a piece of kinetic sculpture that became famous even though hardly anyone saw it: “Ink Line” (1987), a fine stream of black ink flowing from a little hole in the ceiling to another in the floor. Now it is publicly exhibited for the first time. “Ink Line” is a one-liner — a joke about Minimalism — but it is remarkable nevertheless. It looks like a length of shiny black rubber, but on closer examination, you can see that it is moving. Invisibly, below the floor, the ink is collected and pumped back ...
  May 15, 2009 Ken Johnson, Art in Review , The New York Times
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• Charles Ray, a Californian artist who has been active for about 35 years, mostly makes sculptures. Their formidable weight, fragility and cumbersomeness means they don't travel as much as they might, and there have never been many of them--a few a year, perhaps, with long gestation periods before they're completed. Nevertheless, they are often and enthusiastically recalled to explain and illustrate recent art history. Ray makes for a good Google image search
  May 14, 2009 Bones, Bones' Beat: The Uncomfortably Great Charles Ray Show at Matthew Marks , Bone's Beat at Villagevoice.com
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• L'inaugurazione dell'altra sede di Palazzo Grassi ha un momento speciale quando Francois Pinault svela l'attesa e misteriosa opera da lui commissionata per Punta della Dogana, un luogo unico anche per Venezia, sospeso tra pietra e acqua, come la prua di un vascello che divide il Canal Grande dalla Giudecca. Ed ecco A Boy with a Frog, una scultura in acciaio bianco, un ragazzino che tiene in mano una rana, come mostrandola al mondo. L'opera e' di Charles Ray, da vent'anni uno dei piu' importanti artisti sulla scena contemporanea, ed e' una piccola rivoluzione culturale anche per Venezia. Che merita alcune ...
  April 6, 2009 Camerana Benedetto, "La mia rana da' la scossa a Venezia" , La Stampa
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• Strana contraddizione. O forse ingiustizia? Se uno dei nostri studenti, all'Università, risponde meccanicamente che l'opera-scandalo milanese di Cattelan, con i gommosi bambinetti finti-veri impiccati agli alberi, o le spirali di sassi nature del land-artista Richard Long, o la stele di granito di Anselmo, che si mangia progressivamente l'insalata marcescente, sono delle «sculture», tendiamo a scuotere la testa, ad inquietarci, ad impuntarci anzi, se non viene fuori la risposta giusta, la parolina magica e mai saputa (che sia installazione, o environnement, performance o ready made)
  March 7, 2009 Marco Vallora, Lo scultore ha perso il martello , Tutto Libri
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• Los Angeles-based artist Charles Ray's "conceptualist realist" works based on ordinary subjects-even his own geeky, sculptural self-portrait-often have an air of isolation or self-containment. A decade ago, Ray found a huge, fallen tree that he cut up into sections. From those, he cast fiberglass copies that craftsman in Osaka replicated in Japanese cypress (hinoki). The Art Institute of Chicago acquired Hinoki (2007), Ray's 38-foot-long, 2,100-pound sculpture that
  November 2008 Edward M. Gomez, Top 100 treasures , Art & Antiques
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• In his first New York solo show since a 1998 retrospective at the Whitney Museum, Charles Ray offered just three objects: an egg, a boy, and a tractor. Each was perfectly obvious yet sublimely ambiguous. Involving space and time, trust and disbelief, he anxieties of scale, and the implications of psychosexuality, Ray's works sometimes take years to gestate. They revel their intentions equally gradually.
  March 2008 Kim Levin, Reviews: Charles Ray , ARTnews
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• Shows of new sculpture by the L.A. artist Charles Ray are rare—his labor-intensive works may be years in the making—and reliably amazing. He targets aesthetic and conceptual bull’s-eyes that you didn’t know existed. So it is with his three pieces at Matthew Marks. “Father Figure” is an enormous blowup, in machined and glossily painted solid steel, of an old (made in America, that old) plastic toy tractor with a benignly beefy driver. It weighs a Richard Serra-esque eighteen and a half tons. “The New Beetle” is a life-size nude, cast in steel and painted white, of a young boy seated ...
  December 17, 2007 Peter Schjeldahl, Triple Play , The New Yorker
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• Fans of Charles Ray must feel like the artist produces work about as often as Horton hatches a Who. Still, this exhibition, Ray’s first New York solo show since his 1998 mid-career retrospective at the Whitney, proves that the results are worth the wait. In Chicken (2007), Ray depicts a life-size egg with a perfect circle cut away to reveal a baby bird within. Made of painted stainless steel and porcelain, it’s an almost unbearably delicate and intimate object, with the chick’s tiny beak and slicked-down fuzz rendered in painstaking detail. On the opposite end of the scale, there’s Father ...
  December 6, 2007 Anne Wehr, Reviews: Charles Ray , Time Out New York
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• Charles Ray's latest sculpture arrives 10 years after his last major statement, Unpainted Sculpture--the stunning fiberglass replication of a wrecked car painted uniformly in flat, industrial gray. Like the earlier work, Hinoki recreates the husk of something that has been forced out of commission, this time a huge fallen tree that Ray discovered on California's central coast. He methodically sectioned the 32-foot trunk, made silicone molds of the parts and cast them in fiberglass. These served as models for master woodcarvers in Osaka, who replicated the original, decayed tree in freshly cut Japanese cypress (hinoki). The main body of the ...
  December 2007 Leah Ollman, Charles Ray at Regen Projects II , Art in America
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• Ten years ago, while driving up the central coast of California, I spotted a fallen tree in a meadow just off Highway 101. I was instantly drawn to it. It was not only a beautiful log but to my eyes it was perfectly embedded in the meadow where it had fallen. It had been on the ground perhaps 20 or 30 years. Pressure from the weather, insects, ultraviolet radiation and gravity were evident. If not imminent, total collapse appeared to be no more than a handful of years away. The ends of the log were beautifully detailed and drew me ...
  November 7, 2007 Charles Ray, Log , DOMUS
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• During my student years, towards the end of a boozy dinner party, my flatmate turned to our guests and asked them whether, were they to bump into themselves in the bar of an anonymous hotel, they would take themselves to bed. Their answers were mixed. One said ‘yes’, on the grounds that she knew exactly what would please her. Another said ‘no’, because, as a selfish lover, he’d want everything his own way. A third agreed she’d do it, but would walk out on herself in the morning. (‘Everybody else does, so why not me?’) A fourth concluded he wouldn’t, ...
  November - December 2007 Tom Morton, The Shape of Things , Frieze (November–December 2007): 120-127.
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• Charles Ray unlocks the door of an empty storefront down the street from his studio in one of those neighborhoods in Venice, California, that has no dearth of liquor stores. The large space is empty, save for a young boy playing on the floor with his toy car. When Ray flicks on the lights, it becomes clear that the child is a sculpture, a nude rendered in a smooth alabaster white. The surface detail is spare: gently protruding ribs, some grooves for hair. The boy’s gaze is cast downward toward the car, compelling the viewer to kneel next to him ...
  November 2007 Julie L. Belcove , Charles Ray , W Magazine
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• Charles Ray began his career as a craft-conscious Conceptual joker tackling different sculptural properties: scale, gravity, weight and illusion. His early work includes a photograph of him trussed and tied to a rather slender tree branch, a black cube filled to the brim with printer’s ink and a series of objects on a table that rotate slowly and almost imperceptibly, creating an unstill life. He later filmed a young woman standing as motionless as a mannequin on a revolving turntable, wearing a succession of rudimentary garments he had made. He has made a toy fire truck the size of a ...
  November 30, 2007 Roberta Smith, Art in Review: Charles Ray , The New York Times
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• CHARLES RAY DID IN FACT STEAL the thirty-two-foot-long fallen tree that inspired his recent sculpture Hinoki, just as rumor has it. After spotting the tree in a California field, Ray tried and failed to acquire it through legitimate channels. Not to be deterred, he returned to the site, chain saw in tow. Over a series of trips, he transported the tree, in hundreds of pieces, back to his studio in Los Angeles. Thus commenced Hinoki's decadelong backstory--protracted even for Ray, who often spends years on his intricately fabricated sculptures in order to achieve just the right subtle-yet-delirious mimetic shift. Hinoki ...
  September 2007 Rachel Kushner, 1000 words: Charles Ray talks about Hinoki , ArtForum
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• If a tree falls in an art gallery and the entire art world is there to hear it, what kind of sound does it make? That's one question that comes to mind in the presence of Charles Ray's strange, evocative new sculpture, "Hinoki," which inaugurates a second space opened by Regen Projects. It's Ray's first L.A. gallery show in a decade, and he's spent the better part of those last 10 years working on this monumental piece. The sculpture is a hand-crafted doppelganger of a hollow, 32-foot-long oak log the artist stumbled upon rotting away in a field. One answer ...
  May 11, 2007 Christopher Knight , A wooden creation, as lovely as a tree , Los Angeles Times
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• A fallen tree inspired Charles Ray, who liked the way the elements had sculpted it. With Japanese woodcarvers, he made a re-creation. On a break from installing his exhibition at Regen Projects, artist Charles Ray sits in the gallery, shoulders hunched, hands clasped in his lap. Soft-spoken and withdrawn, he comes to life only when he gets up to walk around his latest project: a life-size sculpture of a fallen tree, carved in wood. "I'm interested in where you find yourself in relation to the work," he says, "so your perception of it changes. Scale changes as you move through ...
  May 5, 2007 Sharon Mizota, Looks almost like Mother Nature's , Los Angeles Times
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• Charles Ray is an anachronism. In 1978 the artist presented a wall-mounted sculpture entitled Clock Man, featuring a large generic clock face painted on an oversize wooden box. Ray was situated in the box, and his legs dangled like ridiculous pendulums from holes in the bottom of it. The piece followed from a number of works in which Ray's body was used to activate or complete a sculpture. Several of these were preserved as photographs: Untitled (1973) is a black-and-white photograph of Ray tied to a cantilevered tree branch; Plank Piece I—II (1973) is a photographic diptych that documents the ...
  February 2007 Michael Ned Hote, Slow Dissolve , Art Review
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• Charles Ray is one of the most interesting artists alive. He is a pretty good curator too, judging by the organization of this beautiful, spare and mysterious show of works by three sculptors and a photographer. Mr. Ray is known for offbeat perceptual effects in his own sculpture, like one of a naked family with the two young children enlarged so they stand as tall as their parents. But no special effects are in play in the relatively traditional sculptures on view here. First you encounter one of Giacometti's skinny and crusty standing-woman sculptures. Some distance away is a massive ...
  July 7, 2006 Ken Johnson, Art in Review; A Four Dimensional Being Writes Poetry on a Field With Sculptures , The New York Times
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• The beginning of this essay is the problem of Genesis; time starts before space, and time is very easy to understand until you try to explain it. Space of course has no meaning outside of time, which is its experience. This art show is about space, which I guess is like saying my watch is about time. Actually I do not wear a watch but like you have lived in both space and time. For centuries philosophers and scientists have studied the inscrutability of both these phenomena. Saint Augustine said that time is very easy to understand until you try ...
  June 28, 2006 Charles Ray, A four dimensional being writes poetry on a field with sculptures , Matthew Marks Gallery
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• NEAR the entrance to "Ecstasy," the winning new thematic group exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art's Little Tokyo warehouse space, Berlin artist Klaus Weber has installed a three-tiered fountain made from Victorian cut-glass. Water gaily burbles from the otherwise rather cheesy-looking fountain, splashing down the crystal tiers into a square concrete pool surrounded by tempered-glass walls. According to a signed certificate hanging on a nearby wall, the fountain's water is laced with LSD. The most potent psychotropic substance known to science, it was produced for the artist in a British homeopathy lab. The fountain is a signature piece for ...
  October 11, 2005 Christopher Knight, Take a mind excursion , Los Angeles Times
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• Charles Ray tells Michael Fried how Anthony Caro's work has influenced his own - Michael Fried: When did you first become interested in Anthony Caro's work, and what did it mean to you then? Charles Ray: In 1971 at the University of Iowa. I enrolled in a sculpture class that was taught by Roland Brenner, who had been a student of Caro at St Martins in the early 1960s. Brenner was very strict in his approach to teaching the sculpture studio class. We leaned to weld and were taken to the scrapyard to buy metal. We drew or sketched our ...
  spring 2005 Michael Fried and Charles Ray, Anthony Caro: Early One Morning... , Tate etc.
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• A project for Artforum
  Octorber 2004 Charles Ray, My Warhol , Artforum
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• Last October at an exhibition of 60 young Italian artists in Turin, I encountered ''WalkAround'' by Patrick Tuttofuoco: a three-story staggered grid of blinking lights set to computerized music. I did not like it. As I circled the show I came back to the work several times. This optimistic disco-sculpture required a subtle shift or change in my ability to look at art. I created a space in my mind for this new friend. Art that requires development in the viewer is not as common as one might hope.
  December 29, 2002 Charles Ray, ART/ARCHITECTURE: THE YEAR IN REVIEW; IF YOU ASK ME , The New York Times
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• A project for Frieze
  Novermber - December, 2001 Charles Ray, Before and after , Frieze
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• IN college I heard a story about Giacometti and Picasso walking down a decrepit street in Paris. Picasso, looking up at the ramshackle buildings, asked, ''How can these buildings possibly continue to stand?'' ''Force of habit,'' Giacometti replied. I found the comment hilarious, but as I grew older and began to struggle to get my own sculptures to stand, I started to wonder, ''What does the guy know that I don't?'' Since then I've kept coming back to Giacometti's work. With each return I get a new insight, a fresh experience, but also something harder to articulate: a sense that ...
  October 7, 2001 Charles Ray, Thinking of Sculpture As Shaped by Space , The New York Times
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• A project for Frieze
  January - February, 2000 Charles Ray, Picture , Frieze
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• Mannequins are images of ourselves with the guts ripped out; we dress them up to display our merchandise. Charles Ray’s latest work Fashions (1996) and fashion designer Martin Margiela’s spring collection both focus on the living model as mannequin. The relationship between real and imitated body pushes the envelope of each, creating worlds in which the living and the unliving slip back and forth, begging the question of what is actual and what is fabricated. Fashion and art inspire the possibility of an alternative reality: a world whose frame is drawn between our consciousness and representation.
  May 6, 1997 Yvette Brackman, Charles Ray , Frieze
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• As I was getting off the uptown #6 train I spotted Charles Ray buying subway tokens at the booth. He was looking just like one of his self-portrait sculptures. We were both heading to meet each other at the ‘95 Whitney Biennial to see his new sculpture and to record a conversation between us over lunch. On the way there, Charles told me how he was still shaken by a near fatal incident that occurred while he was exploring a rocky sea cave near Los Angeles in his Zodiac raft. Heavy waves had tossed his raft up against the caves’ ...
  summer 1995 Paul Dickerson, Charles Ray , BOMB
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• A project for Parkett
  fall 1993 Charles Ray, The most beautiful woman in the world , Parkett
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• A project for Ruh-Roh
  November 1992 Charles Ray, Untitled , Ruh-Roh
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• A project for FOREHEAD writing & art journal
  1990 Charles Ray, Four artists curated by Charles Ray , FOREHEAD writing & art journal
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• I make sculptures that engage the viewer physically and psychologically. The use of simple structures focuses attention on the spectators' relationship to the work. The following is a brief description of four of my sculptures. Ink Box A 3' x 3' steel box, painted with black automobile lacquer, is filled to the brim with two hundred gallons of black newspaper ink. The top surface perfectly matches the gloss and color of the sides of the box.
  January 1988 Charles Ray, Charles Ray: A text , Spazio Umano/Human Space
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• I use forms that are images of men and animals. My interest is not in the identity of the image, but rather in the feeling of human duality and contradiction that the sculptures generate. These feelings are communicated through the use of constructed elements made of wood, concrete, or steel. Briefly, in these paragraphs, I will explain the sculptural and personal sources of my work. Psychoanalysis traces human trauma to a conflict between eros and death.
  1980 Charles Ray, Charles Ray , New Orleans Review
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