Il Met di New York ha in corso la mostra "Charles Ray: Figure Ground" che presenta il lavoro di uno dei più importanti artisti della fine del XX e dell'inizio del XXI secolo. Una selezione di 19 opere che raccontano i cinque decenni in cui ha sperimentato un'ampia gamma di metodi, tra cui performance, fotografia e scultura, il mezzo per il quale è oggi più riconosciuto.
CS
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 scholar’s stone, which is meant to facilitate and prolong thoughtful contemplation, Ray’s sculpture poses many trenchant questions but answers none directly.
