ROME.- The American Academy in Rome presents Charles Ray’s latest sculpture Mountain Lion Attacking a Dog (2017), the first exhibition of the celebrated artist in Rome. The new work, developed in collaboration with AAR, is the result of the artist’s profound reflection upon classical sculpture, including several important examples in the Capitoline Museums. On view in the AAR Gallery through July 2, the exhibition includes an earlier work by Ray, Shoe Tie (2012). In related programming, the artist presented two public lectures, where he discussed the ideas that inform his radical reconfiguration of models from antiquity to investigate aspects of American society.

“The Academy is delighted to welcome Charles Ray to Rome and to host his work, which draws on the classical past while addressing essential and difficult aspects of contemporary life and offer something wholly new and profoundly resonant,” said Mark Robbins (1997 Fellow), President of the American Academy in Rome. “Our institution is dedicated to ideas and the creation of new work by scholars and artists across a broad range of disciplines, who, like Ray, interrogate the past in order to propel society forward.”

The collaboration with Ray is the culmination of an ongoing series of events at the American Academy in Rome entitled “American Classics.” In the spirit of Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad (1869), in which America’s mythologies about itself are brought into critical relief in an encounter with Europe, the exhibition and lectures consider the enduring currency of antiquity in the contemporary world.

In both Mountain Lion Attacking a Dog (2017) and Shoe Tie (2012), Ray plays with the conventions defining the canons of classical sculpture. In the former, he revisits the famous Hellenistic sculptural group Lion Attacking a Horse (Greek, 325-300 B.C.; restored in Rome in 1594) from the Capitoline Museums, converting the naturalistic scene of primal violence, among the most storied works of art to survive from antiquity, into an American vernacular. In Ray’s hands, the animal group in the Capitoline, an icon of Rome much admired by Michelangelo Buonarroti, is transposed to an American wilderness encroached upon and compromised by urban sprawl.

Charles Ray is the spring 2017 Deenie Yudell Artist in Residence at the American Academy in Rome.