KASSEL.- The Fridericianum will present Charles Ray’s first institutional solo exhibition in Germany, on view from August 22, 2026, to January 3, 2027. Ray, one of the most important sculptors of his generation, was born in Chicago in 1953 and has lived in Los Angeles since 1981. For over five decades he has explored various disciplines, focusing on sculpture. His work has significantly expanded the potential range of sculpture through conceptual innovation and complex production methods, exploring sculptural structure, proportion, dimension, space, and mass. At the same time, his works reflect social life, consumer and media culture, and fundamental dimensions of human existence.
Rather than devising a retrospective, Ray has opted to create an exhibition that responds to his historical relationship to the venue. The earliest work in the show is the group sculpture Oh! Charley, Charley, Charley… (1992), which he created for documenta 9. It is this work, showing the artist himself eight times engaged in an impossible orgy, that the trajectory of the current exhibition focuses on. Ray leaves it to the viewer to bypass the sexuality of the sculpture and understand it in more philosophical terms.
Ray sees Oh! Charley, Charley, Charley… as the other side of the coin to The Kiss (1907/8) by Constantin Brncuși (1887–1957), where two become one. In Ray’s sculpture, by contrast, there is no other, as “your lover is a projection of yourself.” Ray had developed this technique for his display mannequin sculptures of the early 1990s, yet this work marked his decisive breakthrough into figurative sculpture.
In the present exhibition, the sculpture Oh! Charley, Charley, Charley… is juxtaposed with a work made nearly three decades later: Return to the One (2020), which explores questions of introspection. Although Ray used his own body as the basis for this seated figure modeled from handmade paper, it is not intended as a portrait but rather as an abstract exploration of Plotinus’s (c. 204–270 CE) notion of the return to the One. Meanwhile, despite being strictly figurative, Clothes Pile (2020)—an aluminum sculpture of discarded clothes on the floor of the space—constitutes an abstract foray into the sculptural idea of what can be hollow, but not empty.
The central gallery of the Fridericianum is occupied by another key work in Ray’s oeuvre: Aluminum Girl (2003), his first mature figurative sculpture. The surface of the figure is a manifold for sculptural events to occur upon, bringing together the natural and the stylized, the psychological and the sculptural. In the exhibition, Aluminum Girl enters into dialogue with School Play (2014), a larger-than-life figure made from solid stainless steel, installed in the Rotunda. Modeled in clay and plaster, the sculpture was robotically milled from stainless steel. This figure of a twelve-year-old boy wearing a makeshift toga and carrying a plastic sword refers to the transition from adolescence to manhood.
In Boy with Frog (2009), shown in the adjoining wing of the Kunsthalle, Ray sculpted a nude boy, who is curious to discover the world and its otherness. The trajectory between the boy and the frog forms the sculpture’s armature. This work is paired with Madonna and Child (2026), the most recent work in the exhibition, in which Ray draws on Christian iconography and transposes it into his own contemporary language. The tension of these two works echoes the distance between or the unification of religion and science.
In the gallery where Ray installed his work for documenta 9, three more sculptures make their public debut: the concrete sculpture Bull (2026), the bronze Flounder (2021), and the stainless-steel sculpture Mountain Lion Attacking a Dog (2018). The latter powerfully depicts—through clear references to classical antiquity—a mountain lion biting its prey’s throat. By contrast, Flounder appears timeless atop a cubic plinth, while Bull evokes archaic representations of animals, yet its execution is firmly rooted in the twenty-first century.
Curatorial team: Dana Schtte & Moritz Wesseler
