Charles Ray

Charles Ray (b. 1953, Chicago) is an American sculptor who has lived and worked in Los Angeles since 1981. Working in fiberglass, stainless steel, carved wood, and found objects, his practice addresses the history of Western sculpture — from antiquity through Rodin — through a sustained inquiry into scale, representation, and the perceptual experience of the body. He trained at the University of Iowa (BFA, 1975), where he encountered the constructivist aesthetics of Anthony Caro and David Smith, and at Rutgers University (MFA, 1979), before moving to Los Angeles to teach at UCLA, where he has remained as emeritus professor.

Ray's work moves between media and methods without settling into a single signature form. An early work, Ink Box (1986), is a steel cube filled flush to the rim with black ink, its stillness holding something simultaneously solid and liquid. In the 1990s he turned to figuration, fabricating hyper-precise mannequins — of himself, of anonymous bodies, of family units — in which scale has been subtly or drastically altered: in Family Romance (1993), parents and children are cast at the same height, producing a formal disturbance that is difficult to resolve. Hinoki (2007), in which a fallen California oak tree was replicated at full scale in Japanese cypress after years of study and carving, opened a sustained engagement with the canonical forms of Western sculpture — the equestrian portrait, the reclining figure, the relief — reworked in stainless steel with a precision that is at once archaic and industrial.

Ray's work has been included in the Whitney Biennial and the Venice Biennale on multiple occasions, and he held solo exhibitions at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in 2019 and a double retrospective at the Centre Pompidou and the Bourse de Commerce — Pinault Collection in Paris in 2022. His work is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, among others.