POTOMAC.MD.- Glenstone Museum opened the third in its ongoing series of exhibitions by American artist Charles Ray (b. 1953, Chicago, Illinois). Since the opening of the Pavilions, Glenstone has worked closely with the artist on installations of his work inside Room 8, which rotate every eighteen months. Ray approaches Room 8 as a laboratory of ideas, allowing each presentation to reveal previously uncharted connections between material and form. This third installation explores the tension between balance and instability, self-portraiture, and visual sleights of hand across a range of materials including concrete, steel, hand-made paper, and aluminum. Works on view span the entirety of the artist’s career to date, from an early sculpture conceived in the 1970s to a work completed last year.
“The new installation sheds light on the evolution of Charles Ray’s daring sculpture practice, from his early years when artmaking was akin to solo improvisation, to recent works involving increasingly complex and technically demanding fabrication that can require the labor of several years,” said Emily Wei Rales, director and co-founder of Glenstone. “Grouping together these works made of disparate materials and from different periods allows viewers to focus on the consistent throughline of ideas that form the core of Ray’s art.”
Works on view include two sculptures the artist first conceived during his years as an undergraduate student. Untitled (1971) is a direct and structural exercise in gravity and suspension that consists of a leaning tower of stacked cinder blocks braced in place by the weight of a heavy steel rod. Another work, Untitled (1973-1974), incorporates a large angle iron affixed to a steel plate that balances on the corner of a pedestal. Inspired in part by the constructivist nature of sculpture-making practiced by British artist Anthony Caro (1924-2013), Ray was interested in the relationship between the different parts of a sculpture rather than the overall shape and contour of a work. Ray describes his medium during this period as “odds and ends” salvaged from an industrial heap, remarking that “there was no blueprint in the mind, only rules and an activity. We slid things around on the floor until they locked together aesthetically.”[1]
In Return to the one (2020), on view for the first time, the artist utilizes cast paper to depict himself as he appears today, outfitted with an inscrutable expression and everyday clothes. The work echoes another recent example of self-portraiture, Horse and rider (2014), on view outdoors near the entrance to the Pavilions.
Glenstone will publish a fully illustrated catalogue on the occasion of the exhibition, the third publication dedicated to the rotating exhibition series.
[1] Charles Ray, “Length, Weight, and Age of Aquarius,” Charles Ray Volume II, Glenstone Museum, 2021.
Charles Ray is an artist based in Los Angeles. In 1998, a midcareer retrospective of his work opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art and traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and to the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. In 2014–2015, his work was the subject of a career retrospective co-organized by the Kunstmuseum Basel and the Art Institute of Chicago. In January 2022, a solo presentation will open at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, followed shortly thereafter by simultaneous retrospective exhibitions in Paris at the Centre Pompidou and Bourse de Commerce in February 2022.
