Exhibition: Charles Ray

About the Event

Matthew Marks is pleased to announce an exhibition of three new sculptures by Charles Ray in his gallery at 522 West 22nd Street. Made over the past five years, Ray’s new work continues his investigation of the fundamental elements of sculpture-scale, weight, and medium.

Everyone takes off their pants at least once a day (2024) is a 9-foot-tall sculpture of a woman dressing. The sculpture is constructed from handmade paper and is based on a full-scale model originally made in clay. Merging the contemporary and the classical, the work builds upon ancient traditions of statuary.

Two dead guys (2023) is carved from three solid blocks of Italian marble, one for each figure and a third for the base. It depicts two naked men, just larger than life-size, laying side by side on a rectangular plinth. In some places the smooth surface of their skin presents an eerie perfection, while others reveal their inherently flawed corporeality. As Ray describes, “the finality of death is a window for the viewer to contemplate the mysteries and the inexplicable nature of our existence. Does the spark of our aliveness, the health of our bodies, come from the same fire today as it did for the ancients?”

8FLU100 (2024) is a twenty-four-inch-long paper sculpture of a crashed car. The title refers to the car’s license plate. To make the sculpture, sheets of Japanese paper have been meticulously cut into hundreds of pieces. Each piece is scored and folded, and then assembled by hand to precisely recreate the vehicle. As Ray has written about his paper sculptures, “The work’s fragility and close to zero weight is emergent from drawings. This sculpture is a drawing but drawn with space and time.”

Charles Ray (b. 1953) lives and works in Los Angeles. His work has been featured in Documenta (1992), the Venice Biennale (1993, 2003, 2013), and the Whitney Biennial (1989, 1993, 1995, 1997, 2010) and has been the subject of numerous museum exhibitions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1998), the Kunstmuseum Basel (2014), the Art Institute of Chicago (2015), Centre Pompidou, Paris and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (both 2022).

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