Charles Ray

- Blurb -

This career-spanning publication features conceptual, political, formal, and technical perspectives on the work of contemporary sculptor Charles Ray For Charles Ray (b. 1953), one of today' s foremost American artists, sculpture is a way of thinking that informs his work across a wide range of media-from gelatin silver prints to porcelain, fiberglass, and steel. Ray' s practice is well known but not well understood, a paradox this volume sets out to redress. Spanning the whole of his 50-year career, Charles Ray: Figure Ground considers the artist' s intriguing, often unsettling sculptures from both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in relationship to his early photographs, performances, and installations. It also explores his long-standing fascination with Mark Twain' s 1884 novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Kelly Baum addresses patterns and patterning in Ray' s art, foregrounding his engagement with preexisting traditions, classicism among them, as well as charged issues around race, gender, and sexuality. Brinda Kumar investigates the modalities of touch that run through Ray' s work, while a reflection by Ray himself and a conversation between the artist and Hal Foster offer further views into Ray' s multifaceted practice.