articles / magazine projects / writings

• Parrebbe l'ultimo dei nostri problemi. Qualcuno ha chiesto e ottenuto la rimozione di una scultura dalla Punta della Dogana, a Venezia. Al suo posto verrà rimesso il lampione ch’era stato rimosso in via provvisoria nel 2009. Il motivo della richiesta è semplice. La scultura, che ritrae in modo realistico un bambino che afferra una rana, è un segno troppo sfacciatamente moderno per poter rimanere troppo a lungo nel cuore della Venezia monumentale. Stride. Nell’anno in cui tutto pare caderci addosso come macigni, questo parrebbe essere l’ultimo dei nostri problemi. La rimozione anticipata di una scultura dallo spazio pubblico di una ...
  29 Aprile 2013 Anthony Louis Marasco, L'ultimo dei nostri problemi , Centro Einaudi
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• Egregio Bonami, sono il veneziano «doc» che lotta dal 2009 per il Lampione («Chi ha paura di una scultura?» su La Stampa di ieri in prima pagina, ndr). Dal suo ritorno si spera che finalmente la città, forse, non verrà amministrata più con le deroghe, ma con le regole. Qui si tratta di diritti e non di arte: questo specificano Franco Miracco e il sottoscritto. Ma le migliaia di Veneziani che rivogliono il lampione, amano l’arte e la propria città, al di là di rane che hanno garantito guardie giurate a propria difesa rendendo di fatto un pezzo pubblico della ...
  Venezia, perché lampione e non rana Manuel Vecchina, Francesco Bonami, Venezia, perche lampione e non rana , La Stampa
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• Che nessun partito o gruppo politico abbia prestato attenzione nel proprio programma alla voce «cultura», sia come «bene culturale» sia come «produzione culturale», era già una cosa molto grave, ma di questi tempi meravigliarsi dello stato dell’arte, politica o meno, è un po’ da ingenui. Certo però rimane difficile non scandalizzarsi davanti alla notizia, appena confermata dallo stesso artista, Charles Ray, che il famoso e fotografatissimo Ragazzo con la rana, la scultura che dal 2009 ha cambiato il paesaggio di Venezia in cima a Punta della Dogana, nel giro di pochi giorni dovrà fare le valigie. Il Comune non gli ...
  March, 2013 Francesco Bonami, Venezia, chi ha paura di una rana? , La Stampa
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• Over the past 30-plus years, Charles Ray has produced successive bodies of sculpture that superficially appear quite different from one another. There have been works performed for the camera that employed the artist's own body as a sculptural element. There have been conceptual variations on minimalist forms: a line that is a continuous stream of ink flowing from a hole in the ceiling to a hole in the floor; a cube that is a black-painted steel box open at the top and filled to the brim with black ink; and a circle that is a mechanized white disc set flush ...
  February, 2013 Anne Doran, Charles Ray at Matthew Marks , Art in America
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• For more than five years now, Charles Ray has been making sculptures based closely on the human figure, somewhat in the manner of his first work of this type, *Aluminum Girl*, 2003. In his 2007 show at Matthew Marks Gallery, another such piece, *The New Beetle*, 2007, depicted, if that is the work, a naked young boy seated directly on the ground playing with a small model of a volkswagen. Since then, Ray has been mining this vein in a number of works, three of which, all dated 2012, made up his recent exhibition in the same gallery. The first ...
  February, 2013 Michael Fried, Charles Ray, Matthew Marks Gallery , Artforum
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• Umberta Genta: Do you have an obsessive personality? I can't help wondering about it when I look at the extreme perfection of your work. Charles Ray: I would say someone might say that I was obsessive, but really I am not. I have discipline and persistence. Obsession is undisciplined and mindless, two qualities that are out of place in a good artwork -- or any work, for that matter. UG: does your meticulous approach manifest itself in your daily life? CR: It depends upon what vantage
  January - February, 2013 Umberta Genta, Charles Ray: Using Time , Flash Art
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• Figurative sculpture is almost as old as the human body but also as new as whatever fresh materials, techniques and meanings artists can rally to their cause. The latest confirmation of this comes from Charles Ray's new forays into post-Conceptual realism, three works based on actual people (but 10 percent larger) and carved by computer driven machines from solid stainless steel. Luminous rather than reflective, they form a beautifully spare arrangement in Matthew Marks's large, nearly empty gallery and produce a cat's cradle of richocheting ideas. Their solidity is not immediately apparent, but they sure don't seem hollow.
  November 23, 2012 Roberta Smith, Art in Review, Charles Ray , The New York Times
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• Pythagoras was as global as one could be. He met all the Who that *were* Who in those days (6th century BC). He was a giant. He had Charisma, Warmth, and Charm galore. Star qualities! They were quieter times. You could hear yourself think. Pythagoras dug music. He took time to design the Octave and the Fifth. He figured out how we would sing to the Gods and each other, by codifying the modes.
  Spring 2012 Van Dyke Parks, Memphis Musicaux , TAR magazine
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• Known for realistic sculptures of oversize children and incredibly detailed recreations of smashed cars and fallen trees, Charles Ray has made a career out of playing with our perceptions. Two new sculptures at Matthew Marks are no exception, evoking classical statuary and confounding assumptions about materials. Each work depicts a life size figure. One is a man whom Ray made a cast of about 10 years ago; the other is a woman he photographed sleeping on the street.
  May 11, 2012 Sharon Mizota, Visual links to the past , Los Angeles Times
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• If I did not have this computer, the floor of my office would look like a John Chamberlain exhibition, scattered with crumpled-up sheets of paper to remind me of the false starts I have made in writing this short essay. Like this imagined office floor, my appreciation of Chamberlain's work has been littered with false starts and misunderstandings. Perhaps my greatest misconception of Chamberlain's sculptures comes from their entanglement with recent American cultural history.
  February 24, 2012 Charles Ray, Soft Future , Guggenheim Museum
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• Mr. Pinault asked me to make a big sculpture for the point of the Dogana. I might have made it anyway. I had already begun to think about the piece, although not in its totality, and it's related to *The New Beetle* (2006). But when Mr. Pinault talked to me about the project, all of my thinking came together. I can never separate the production of the work from its creation. It's not like I have this idea and then we go build it.
  2011 Paul Schimmel, Ray, Charles , In Praise Of Doubt
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• The newest work of magic here is American artist Charles Ray's eight-foot-high white painted steel boy examining a frog pulled, as it were, from the lagoon. *Boy with Frog* was made specifically for the point on the quay of the rehabilitated 17th-century customs house Punta della Dogana, François Pinault's vast new art museum. The Punta della Dogana and the Palazzo Grassi from the François Pinault Foundation, twin spaces devoted to exhibiting the massive contemporary art collection belonging to the French luxury–goods magnate.
  Summer 2011 Matthew Rose, Venice's Contemporary Masterpieces , InCircle Entrée
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• Formally, the psychological effects of Trotman's manipulation of scale link him to Charles Ray, whose sculptures include *Fall '91 (1992)*, an intimidating eight-foot-high businesswoman who towers over viewers, and *Family Romance (1993)*, a four-member family group in which all figures, from toddler to father, are presented naked and the same size, subtly altering their interrelationships.
  November 7, 2010 Linda Johnson Dougherty, Bob Trotman: Inverted Utopias , North Carolina Museum of Art
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• It's 5:45 A.M. At Charles Ray's request, I'm making my way toward the cabin at the entrance of Temescal Canyon Park. Moments later Charley - as he prefers to be called - arrives in his silver Prius. He takes me to the beginning of the looping five-mile trail he climbs every morning. The trail begins in the woods and it's still moonlight this early in the day. Feelings of wonder and fear lie at every turn. As we work our way uphill our eyes adjust as night slowly turns to day. The gold California light leaks over the mountaintops and ...
  Spring Summer 2011 Alex Israel, Charles Ray , Purple Fashion Magazine
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• Eli Broad. Broad, a multibillionaire who made his money in the decidedly unglamorous businesses of tract housing and insurance, is the Lorenzo de’ Medici of Los Angeles—the city’s singular patron, especially of the arts. On the evening of November 13th, nine hundred of the city’s wealthier citizens and many of its most celebrated artists joined Broad at the Museum of Contemporary Art, on Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles. It was MOCA’s second fund-raising gala since Broad bailed out the nearly insolvent museum, in December, 2008.
  December 6, 2010 Connie Bruck, The Art of the Billionaire , The New Yorker
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• I have an unfortunate tendency to fall asleep during movies. Often I don’t make it through a title sequence without my wife elbowing me to stop my snoring. For this reason, it was really great to see “The Spectacular Art of Jean-Léon Gérôme” at the Getty Center this summer: Paintings of Roman arenas, slave girls, boys with snakes, and dignitaries from Siam awoke me to the splendors of a Hollywood screen. An additional bonus for Los Angeles (a city that loves its art professors) was the exhibition at LACMA of sporting images by Thomas Eakins. While Gérôme’s gladiators and bloodied ...
  December 2010 Charles Ray, The Artists' Artists , Artforum
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• La polemica Troppi i venerati maestri che hanno fatto fortuna grazie al cattivo gusto e all'ignornza del pubblico. Un grande critico spiega come smascherare chi bluffa, passando ai raggi x l opere di mostri sacri. Da Morandi a Picasso, fino a Bill Viola, Charles Ray e Julian Schnabel. Ci sono sculture tarocche e quadri falsi, ma e possible che esistano anche artisti tarocchi che fanno quadri e sculture vere? Possibilissimo. Come Capirlo? Non e semplicissimo ma possiamo provarci.
  Jun 5 2010, Francesco Bonami, Arte Contemporanea Chi Ci E E Chi Ci Fa , Panorama
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• Charles Ray's wizardry with boundary-breaking was conspicuous in this low-tech but high-interest exhibition. Three works from a little more than 20 years ago defied ceiling, floor and wall, showing the viewer how simple interventions can result in sculptures of startling intelligence and rough beauty. In each piece, Ray conceals a motor or pump that causes the sculpture to do what it does, but his instruments, while concealed, feel rudimentary. Ray is a thoroughly classical postmodern sculptor, if such a characterization makes sense. He creates one-off pieces that range widely without necessarily relating closely to each other - for example, there ...
  Apr 1 2010, Jonathan Goodman, New York: Charles Ray , Sculpture
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• The art world is peculiarly suited to dramatize a problem, or at least a syndrome, of the present day: that of abominable wealth, by which I mean the effect of huge fortunes on people who don’t have them. The global tide of prosperity that rose in the past decade has, in receding, stranded most boats that aren’t ocean liners. This condition pertains with special poignance to a sphere in which the rich (collectors, patrons) and the relatively poor (artists, intellectuals) intermingle. The Greek billionaire Dakis Joannou, whose fabulous holdings of contemporary art are sampled in a controversial show with a ...
  March 15, 2010 Peter Schjeldahl, Big Time , The New Yorker
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• The cover of the 2010 Whitney Biennial catalogue displays a picture of Barack Obama as a Dapper Dan cowboy. Inside, guest curator Francesco Bonami and co-curator Gary Carrion-Murayari call the president “the coolest artist of all” and say their show is about “innovative forms,” “new relationships,” and “personal modernism.” After two biennials devoted to dealing with “failure” and “darkness,” this catalogue speaks of “renewal” and “optimism.” Yes, it’s the Obama Biennial: alternately moving and frustrating, challenging and disappointing—and a big improvement on what came before.
  March 8, 2010 Jerry Saltz, Change We Can Believe In , New York Magazine
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• For me, the most arresting work in the Whitney Biennial is, not for the first time, by Charles Ray. The California creator of aesthetically potent oddities rattled the 1989 Biennial with a disk shaped section of wall that inconspicuously rotated at fantastic speed; the 1993 Biennial, with a veristic sculpture of a naked family of four, all the size of its young son, and a life-size plastic toy fire engine, parked out on Madison Avenue; and the 1995 edition, with a wooden, carved and painted, full-length self-portrait in a clear-glass bottle.
  March 8, 2010 Peter Schjeldahl, No Offense , The New Yorker
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• The Whitney finally figures out how to put on a Biennial. Over the years, the Whitney Biennial has been described variously as "the Oscars of the art world" and "the show everybody loves to hate." but neither description seems to fit anymore, given the diminishing returns in the past decade by sucessive iterations of this biannual showcase of contemporary art. Perhaps "Golden Globes of the art world," or "the show everyone pays lip service to but nobody quite knows why," would be more suitable, though in a perfect world, the Biennial would be retired. That'll never happen, of course,
  Mar 4 2010, Howard Halle, Art Reviews: 2010 Whitney Biennal , Time Out New York
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• Charles Ray is one of a dozen Los Angeles based artists participating in the 2010 Whitney Biennial opening Thursday in New York, but he's the only one making his fifth appearance since 1989 in the important exhibition of contemporary American Art. Among his memorable entries were 1993's "Firetruck," 12-by-47-foot replica of a toy fire truck "parked" outside the museum, and his "Family Romance," which he described as "a nuclear family' - four nude fiberglass figures holding hands now in the collection of New York's Museum of Modern Art. Last spring, his 8-foot-tall sculpture of a boy dangling a frog, aptly ...
  February 21, 2010 Irene Lacher, Festival frame of mind , Los Angeles Times
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• Con il restauro ell'architetto giapponese Tadao Ando, l'antico edicicio diventato il nuovo spazio espositivo della Fondazione Pinault Per secoli e stato il primo approccio alla Serenissima per gli stranieri che arrivavano via mare nelbacino marciano e, per i mercanti veneziani, il luogo familiare che da lontano indicava la via del ritorno, il termine del viaggio. Con la sua posizione strategica sulla punta dell'isola di Dorsoduro, alla confluenza tra il canale della Giudecca e il Canal Grande e in faccia a San Marco, Punta Della Dogana e sempre stata un luogo emblematico, che nemmeno trent'anni di abbandono hanno offuscato. Oggi si ...
  Sep 1 2009, Sandra Minute, L'Arte Non Paga Dazio , Bell'Italia
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• The Punta Della Dogana is a protrusion of land that jut out at the southern entrance of Venice's Grand Canal. Its name, which means "Customs Point," refers to an earlier function of the spot: Serving as venice's chief maritime portal. it was the location of the city's sea customs for four centuries. As a site historically given over to the task of deciding what may or may not enter, the Punta would provide any collector a powerful venue for putting his aesthetic criteria on display. The customs building is especially appropriate for Francois Pinault, the French billionaire whose private collection ...
  Sep 1 2009, Sarah K. Rich, Port Authority , Artforum
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• Quest'estate Venezia è la capitale mondiale dell'arte contemporanea. È stata inaugurata Punta della Dogana, con la faraonica collezione di François Pinault. Poco distante, ai Magazzini del Sale, le grandi tele di Emilio Vedova scorrono appese a un binario fissato sull'alto soffitto, smistate da un computer-capostazione, poi tornano a immagazzinarsi roboticamente sul fondo della sala. Si rimescolano come un mazzo di carte per una partita fra giganti in cui è di briscola il caos, o il solitario di un dio che collaudi le diverse combinazioni dell'informe prima della creazione. La Peggy Guggenheim Collection propone gli assemblaggi di scarti raccolti da Robert ...
  August 12, 2009 Tiziano Scarpa, Come pazza Venezia , Lespresso
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• L'inaugurazione dell'altra sede di Palazzo Grassi ha un momento speciale quando Francois Pinault svela l'attesa e misteriosa opera da lui commissionata per Punta della Dogana, un luogo unico anche per Venezia, sospeso tra pietra e acqua, come la prua di un vascello che divide il Canal Grande dalla Giudecca. Ed ecco A Boy with a Frog, una scultura in acciaio bianco, un ragazzino che tiene in mano una rana, come mostrandola al mondo. L'opera e' di Charles Ray, da vent'anni uno dei piu' importanti artisti sulla scena contemporanea, ed e' una piccola
  Jul, 04, 2009 Camerana Benedetto, ''La mia rana da' la scossa a Venezia" Camerana intervista Charles Ray , La Stampa
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• Non smette di rampare, aereo, l’imbalsamato cavallo araldico di Cattelan, chiave di volta dell’imponente zampata ottica del vasto atrio-chiostro della svelata Punta della Dogana. Sentendosi un poco, forse, un leone alato della Serenissima a capofitto entro una cupola muta di mattoni, nauseato ippogrifo ariostesco da machina ronconiana, la testa caparbiamente ficcata entro la parete, come a non badare a questo sudore mondano ed umano, che gli zampetta intorno, fremente. Sarebbe troppo corrivo osare la scorciatoia
  June 08, 2009 Marco Vallora, Le straordinarie architetture di Tadao Ando per Punta della Dogana , La Stampa
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• Scarpe, scarpe. In fondo e questo il dilemma che accompagna tutte le signore planate a Venezia da ogni angolo del mondo per i vernissage chic in laguna. Al plurale: perche quest'anno sono stati inaugurati con grande clamore mediatico, moti bicchieri di prosecco e inviti a numero chiuso, due capolavori d'architettura. Ovvero il nuovo museo di Renzo Piano, dedicato a Vedova, e Punta della Dogana, a firma di Tadao Ando, che ospita la collezione Pinault.
  June, 2009 Lisa Corva, Il lato glam della Biennale , Grazia
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• Nelle lunghe stanze rettangolari ripartite con una serie di pareti Parallele tra gli antichi muri in mattone e le capriate, in modo che dalle lunette e dai lucernai la vista possa spaziare a 360 gradi sul triangolo di cielo e mare fra la cima del Canal Grande e la punta del Canale della Giudecca, Pinault ha invitato i suoi artisti preferiti a innamorarsi del luogo: > spiega Monique Veautem, direttrice del doppio museo veneziano Grassi/Punta Dogana<<in uno spazio cosi potente avrebbero potuto
  June 02, 2009 Melisa Garzonio, Lo spazio ideale per creare , Il Secolo XIX
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• I don't know how to express this idea without sounding overly romantic, but I like art with a little magic to it. The art world typically replaces the word "magic" with “mystery," a colder noun more likely to entice collectors than a term evoking rabbits and hats, but the latter term is not always appropriate. Mystery has certain perks, implying critical engagement, the desire and possibility of solving and figuring out the unknown; "Magic" doesn't offer this kind of triumphal resolution.
  July 06, 2009 Paddy Johnson, Magic vs. Mystery in the Art Worlds , The L Magazine
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• L'inaugurazione dell'altra sede di Palazzo Grassi ha un momento speciale quando Francois Pinault svela l'attesa e misteriosa opera da lui commissionata per Punta della Dogana, un luogo unico anche per Venezia, sospeso tra pietra e acqua, come la prua di un vascello che divide il Canal Grande dalla Giudecca. Ed ecco A Boy with a Frog, una scultura in acciaio bianco, un ragazzino che tiene in mano una rana, come mostrandola al mondo. L'opera e' di Charles Ray, da vent'anni uno dei piu' importanti artisti sulla scena contemporanea, ed e' una piccola rivoluzione culturale anche per Venezia. Che merita alcune ...
  June 04, 2009 Camerana Benedetto, La mia rana da' la scossa a Venezia" Camerana intervista Charles Ray , La Stampa
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• A project for Ruh Roh
  Dec. 2009 Charles Ray, Untitled , Ruh Roh
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• Venice is the perfect place for a phase of art to die. No other city on earth embraces entropy quite like this magical floating mall. There are now more than 100 biennales around the world (most of them put together by the same 25 celebrity curators, drawing from the same pool of 100 or so artists); Venice is often called “the most important” of them. The main show of this year’s Venice Biennale is the work of Daniel Birnbaum, a well-respected 46-year-old Swedish critic and curator. His “Making Worlds,” held in the Palazzo delle Esposizioni delle Biennale and in the ...
  Jun 19, 2009 Jerry Saltz, Entropy in Venice , New York Magazine
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• Charles Ray tells Michael Fried how Anthony Caro's work has influenced his own - Michael Fried: When did you first become interested in Anthony Caro's work, and what did it mean to you then? Charles Ray: In 1971 at the University of Iowa. I enrolled in a sculpture class that was taught by Roland Brenner, who had been a student of Caro at St Martins in the early 1960s. Brenner was very strict in his approach to teaching the sculpture studio class. We leaned to weld and were taken to the scrapyard to buy metal. We drew or sketched our ...
  Spring 2005 Michael Fried and Charles Ray, Anthony Caro: Early One Morning... , Tate etc.
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• On a recent walk through Chelsea, I remembered a Steven Wright joke: "I've been doing a lot of abstract painting lately, extremely abstract. No brush, no paint, no canvas - I just think about it." Not a reaction to seeing rafts of abstract canvases, but rather a response to experiencing two exhibitions of realistic sculpture confected as antidotes to volumetric abstraction, the crack stuck with me as I took in the meticulously unsettling work of two foundational artists: Charles Ray and Duane Hanson.
  November 28 - December 4, 2007 Christian Viveros-Faune, The Anxiety of Realism , Village Voice
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• More than 20 years ago, Charles Ray created a piece of kinetic sculpture that became famous even though hardly anyone saw it: "Ink Line" (1987), a fine stream of black ink flowing from a little hole in the ceiling to another in the floor. Now it is publicly exhibited for the first time. "Ink Line" is a one-liner - a joke about Minimalism - but it is remarkable nevertheless. It looks like a length of shiny black rubber, but on closer examination, you can see that it is moving.
  May 15, 2009 Ken Johnson, Art in review: Charles Ray , The New York Times
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• A quivering, slender, blue-black column extending form floor to ceiling, Charles Ray's* Ink Line *(1987) is one of those rare works of art capable of provoking a double take, even in the forewarned viewer. Like Richard Wilson's 20:50, an audience favorite from the same year, *Ink Line* seems to transform the liquid from which it's made into something completely different. Whereas Wilson exploited the reflective properties of oil to make a pool
  June 18-24, 2009 Michael Wilson, Reviews: Charles Ray , Time Out New York
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• A legendary work by Ray, never before exhibited in public, may well be the damnedest think you ever saw. "Ink Line" (1987) is a gleaming, almost imperceptibly rippling filament of printer's ink continuously falling from a tiny hole in the ceiling into a tiny hole in the floor. Hymning absolute verticality (guaranteed by gravity), absolute blackness, and minimalist presence in overdrive, it rivets and even somehow, serenely, terrifies. Two other early motorized
  June 22, 2009 Charles Ray , The New Yorker
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• VENICE — This week, the art-world tsunami is crashing down here for the 53rd Biennale, which opens to the public June 7 and runs through November 22. Hoteliers and restaurateurs of this extremely impractical but unique city are not so keen about the art hordes, made of people who want to pay less and stay longer. Still, the Biennale crowd does elevate the atmosphere around here, which is usually filled with backpackers and package-tour-goers, who today, during the press preview, are getting jammed up at the Ponte dei Sospiri. The bridge is currently covered up with ugly advertising courtesy of ...
  June 3, 2009 Francesco Bonami, For the Moment | Francesco Bonami , The Moment Blog - NYTimes.com
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• Charles Ray, a Californian artist who has been active for about 35 years, mostly makes sculptures. Their formidable weight, fragility and cumbersomeness means they don't travel as much as they might, and there have never been many of them--a few a year, perhaps, with long gestation periods before they're completed. Nevertheless, they are often and enthusiastically recalled to explain and illustrate recent art history. Ray makes for a good Google image search
  May 14, 2009 Bones, Bones' Beat: The Uncomfortably Great Charles Ray Show at Matthew Marks , Bone's Beat at Villagevoice.com
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• Strana contraddizione. O forse ingiustizia? Se uno dei nostri studenti, all'Università, risponde meccanicamente che l'opera-scandalo milanese di Cattelan, con i gommosi bambinetti finti-veri impiccati agli alberi, o le spirali di sassi nature del land-artista Richard Long, o la stele di granito di Anselmo, che si mangia progressivamente l'insalata marcescente, sono delle «sculture», tendiamo a scuotere la testa, ad inquietarci, ad impuntarci anzi, se non viene fuori la risposta giusta, la parolina magica e mai saputa (che sia installazione, o environnement, performance o ready made)
  March 7, 2009 Marco Vallora, Lo scultore ha perso il martello , Tutto Libri
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• VENICE — This dazzling city got a new landmark this week, an eight-foot-tall sculpture of a boy holding a frog, by the American artist Charles Ray. Prominently situated outdoors on the very tip of the Punta della Dogana on the Grand Canal, it has already become a signpost for Venice’s newest contemporary art space. Two years ago François Pinault, the French luxury goods magnate and art collector who owns Christie’s, beat out the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation for the 17th-century Dogana, the former customs house, signing a 33-year agreement with the City of Venice to transform it into a gallery ...
  June 5, 2009 Carol Vogel, Frog in hand (worth two glances) , The New York Times
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• On certain nights, the California Yacht Club in Marina del Rey can feel like a gathering of the American Institute of Architects. There, out on the patio, is Frank Gehry with a couple of people from his office. At another table, Greg Lynn is knocking back a few beers after a race with the artist Casey Reas and some other fellow faculty members from the U.C.L.A. School of Arts and Architecture. Men who spend their days dreaming up monolithic buildings — or, in the case of the artist and sailor Charles Ray, 18-ton sculptures in solid machined steel — would
  Spring 2009 Alix Browne, Love for sail , The New York Times Style Magazine
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• Los Angeles-based artist Charles Ray's "conceptualist realist" works based on ordinary subjects-even his own geeky, sculptural self-portrait-often have an air of isolation or self-containment. A decade ago, Ray found a huge, fallen tree that he cut up into sections. From those, he cast fiberglass copies that craftsman in Osaka replicated in Japanese cypress (hinoki). The Art Institute of Chicago acquired Hinoki (2007), Ray's 38-foot-long, 2,100-pound sculpture that
  November 2008 Edward M. Gomez, Top 100 treasures , Art & Antiques
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• A quivering, slender, blue-black column extending from floor to ceiling, Charles Ray's *Ink Line* (1987) is ine of those rare works of art capable of provoking a double take, even in the forewarned viewer. Like Richard Wilson's *20:50*, and audience favorite from the same year, *Ink Line* seems to transform the liquid from which it's made into something completely different. Whereas Wilson exploited reflective properties of oil to make a pool that vanishes into its surroundings, Ray leans on the opacity from a moving stream. Only a slight wobble, a gentle trickling sound and the presence of a nervous gallery ...
  Jun 18 2009, Michael Wilson, Reviews: Charles Ray , Time Out New York
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• The New York Times art critic Ken Johnson is writing a book saying that “psychedelic drugs and psychedelic culture have had a deeper, less obvious influence on the art of the past 60 years than has generally been acknowledged.” Johnson doesn’t mean that the intermingling of art and drugs is new; they’ve probably been canoodling as long as both have been around. And his idea isn’t about artists who actually use drugs. Sober-looking work is made by stoners and addled-looking art is made by teetotalers. Van Eyck’s hyperreal paintings are among the most hallucinogenic works ever made. In some ways, ...
  Jun 15-22, 2009 Jerry Saltz, Dude, You’ve Gotta See This , New York Magazine
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• BASEL, Switzerland — There was a commotion on the second floor of Art Basel shortly after the fair opened here on Tuesday. Crowds gathered around a darkened alcove, listening with rapt attention to Pharrell Williams. This 36-year-old recording artist and producer wasn’t talking music, nor was he discussing his personal art collection, which includes paintings by Andy Warhol and Takashi Murakami. Rather, Mr. Williams, wearing a red-checked gingham shirt, a brown fedora and baggy blue jeans, was explaining a group of objects that had been carefully arranged in the open mouth of a whimsical fiberglass monster. “They’re the things in ...
  June 12, 2009 Carol Vogel, A Thriftier Lot Comes to Basel This Year , The New York Times
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• A project for Artforum
  Octorber 2004 Charles Ray, My Warhol , Artforum
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• Last October at an exhibition of 60 young Italian artists in Turin, I encountered ''WalkAround'' by Patrick Tuttofuoco: a three-story staggered grid of blinking lights set to computerized music. I did not like it. As I circled the show I came back to the work several times. This optimistic disco-sculpture required a subtle shift or change in my ability to look at art. I created a space in my mind for this new friend. Art that requires development in the viewer is not as common as one might hope.
  December 29, 2002 Charles Ray, ART/ARCHITECTURE: THE YEAR IN REVIEW; IF YOU ASK ME , The New York Times
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• A project for Frieze
  Novermber-December 2001 Charles Ray, Before and after , Frieze
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• A project for Frieze
  Jan-Feb 2000 Charles Ray, Picture , Frieze
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• A project for Parkett
  Fall 1993 Charles Ray, The most beautiful woman in the world , Parkett
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• A project for FOREHEAD writing & art journal
  1990 Charles Ray, Four artists curated by Charles Ray , FOREHEAD writing & art journal
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• I make sculptures that engage the viewer physically and psychologically. The use of simple structures focuses attention on the spectators' relationship to the work. The following is a brief description of four of my sculptures. Ink Box A 3' x 3' steel box, painted with black automobile lacquer, is filled to the brim with two hundred gallons of black newspaper ink. The top surface perfectly matches the gloss and color of the sides of the box.
  January 1988 Charles Ray, Charles Ray: A text , Spazio Umano/Human Space
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• Le straordinarie architetture di Tadao Ando per Puna della Dogana
  Jun 8 2009, Marco Vallora, Cavalli volanti e baci di gesso a casa Pinault , La Stampa
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• It's easy to understand why Alison Gingeras, the curator of French billionaire François Pinault's art collection, suggests we meet at the bar of the Monaco Hotel in Venice. The view from the hotel terrace over to Dogana del Mare, the 17th-century customs house across the Grand Canal, is spectacular. La Dogana, as the building will now be known, is also where Gingeras has worked night and day for the last six weeks. Timed to coincide with the opening of the Venice Biennale, it will throw open its doors later this week. Rewind to spring 2001, when Pinault, who built a ...
  Wednesday 3 June 2009 Agnès Poirier , How the French Charles Saatchi became the merchant of Venice , The Guardian
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• VENICE--This week the art-world tsunami is crashing down here for the 53rd Biennale, which opens to the public June 7 and runs through November 22. Hoteliers and restaurateurs of this extremely impractical but unique city are not so keen about the art hordes, made of people who want to pay less and stay longer, Still, the Biennale crowd does elevate the atmosphere around here, which is usually filled with backpackers and package-tour-goers, who today, during the press preview, are getting jammed up at the Ponte dei Sospiri. The bridge is curently covered up with ugly advertising courtesy of the sponsor ...
  Jun 3 2009, Francesco Bonami, For the Moment , T Magazine online
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• VENICE, Italy (Reuters) - Venice's latest contemporary art gallery will open to the public on Saturday after nearly two years of building work and anticipation. The Punta della Dogana on the tip of La Serenissima's Grand Canal will house major works from the vast catalog of Francois Pinault, a French luxury goods billionaire who has one of the world's largest collections of contemporary art. Pinault, ranked as the world's 41st richest man according to Forbes magazine, already displays a series of his works at the grandiose Palazzo Grassi which he owns on the Grand Canal. But the new Dogana aims ...
  Jun 2, 2009 Eliza Apperly, Venice set for summer of art as new gallery opens , Reuters
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• In "There Will Be Blood", il futuro magnate Daniel Plainview ha un attimo di rapace bellezza, ed a quando si accorge per la prima volta che la libertae un bene primario, il motore di qualsiasi sfida etica e morale. Non e l'indice di un comportamento, sicuramente non lo pensa Uptown Sinclair quandosrive "Oil!" nel 1927, perche Plainview di mestiere cerca petrolio e la sua visione epica dello scontro fra uomini e compressa tra la fortuna di trivellare nuovi affari. Ma la bellezza, comunque, levita intorno: la natura incontaminata, l ruvida austerita dei contadini, le preghiere per salvare il raccolto e ...
  Jun 2 2009, Renalto Tortarolo, Una Finestra sull'arte , Il Secolo
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• More than 20 year ago, Charles Ray created a piece of kinetic sculpture hat became famous even though hardly anyone saw it: "Ink Line" (1987), a fine stream of black ink flowing from a little hole in the ceiling to another in the floor.
  May 15 2009, Ken Johnson, Art in Review , The New York Times
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• Camerana intervista Charles Ray
  Apr 6 2009, Camerana Benedetto, "La mia rana da' la scossa a Venezia" , La Stampa
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• In his first New York solo show since a 1998 retrospective at the Whitney Museum, Charles Ray offered just three objects: an egg, a boy, and a tractor. Each was perfectly obvious yet sublimely ambiguous. Involving space and time, trust and disbelief, he anxieties of scale, and the implications of psychosexuality, Ray's works sometimes take years to gestate. They revel their intentions equally gradually.
  March, 2008 Kim Levin, Reviews: Charles Ray , ARTnews
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• Shows of new sculpture by the L.A. artist Charles Ray are rare—his labor-intensive works may be years in the making—and reliably amazing. He targets aesthetic and conceptual bull’s-eyes that you didn’t know existed. So it is with his three pieces at Matthew Marks. “Father Figure” is an enormous blowup, in machined and glossily painted solid steel, of an old (made in America, that old) plastic toy tractor with a benignly beefy driver. It weighs a Richard Serra-esque eighteen and a half tons. “The New Beetle” is a life-size nude, cast in steel and painted white, of a young boy seated ...
  December 17, 2007 Peter Schjeldahl, Triple Play , The New Yorker
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• Fans of Charles Ray must feel like the artist produces work about as often as Horton hatches a Who. Still, this exhibition, Ray’s first New York solo show since his 1998 mid-career retrospective at the Whitney, proves that the results are worth the wait. In Chicken (2007), Ray depicts a life-size egg with a perfect circle cut away to reveal a baby bird within. Made of painted stainless steel and porcelain, it’s an almost unbearably delicate and intimate object, with the chick’s tiny beak and slicked-down fuzz rendered in painstaking detail. On the opposite end of the scale, there’s Father ...
  December 6, 2007 Anne Wehr, Reviews: Charles Ray , Time Out New York
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• Charles Ray's latest sculpture arrives 10 years after his last major statement, Unpainted Sculpture--the stunning fiberglass replication of a wrecked car painted uniformly in flat, industrial gray. Like the earlier work, Hinoki recreates the husk of something that has been forced out of commission, this time a huge fallen tree that Ray discovered on California's central coast. He methodically sectioned the 32-foot trunk, made silicone molds of the parts and cast them in fiberglass. These served as models for master woodcarvers in Osaka, who replicated the original, decayed tree in freshly cut Japanese cypress (hinoki). The main body of the ...
  Dec, 2007 Leah Ollman, Charles Ray at Regen Projects II , Art in America
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• During my student years, towards the end of a boozy dinner party, my flatmate turned to our guests and asked them whether, were they to bump into themselves in the bar of an anonymous hotel, they would take themselves to bed. Their answers were mixed. One said ‘yes’, on the grounds that she knew exactly what would please her. Another said ‘no’, because, as a selfish lover, he’d want everything his own way. A third agreed she’d do it, but would walk out on herself in the morning. (‘Everybody else does, so why not me?’) A fourth concluded he wouldn’t, ...
  November–December 2007 Morton, Tom, The Shape of Things , Frieze (November–December 2007): 120-127.
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• Ten years ago, while driving up the central coast of California, I spotted a fallen tree in a meadow just off Highway 101. I was instantly drawn to it. It was not only a beautiful log but to my eyes it was perfectly embedded in the meadow where it had fallen. It had been on the ground perhaps 20 or 30 years. Pressure from the weather, insects, ultraviolet radiation and gravity were evident. If not imminent, total collapse appeared to be no more than a handful of years away. The ends of the log were beautifully detailed and drew me ...
  07. Nov. 2007 Charles Ray, Log , DOMUS
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• Charles Ray unlocks the door of an empty storefront down the street from his studio in one of those neighborhoods in Venice, California, that has no dearth of liquor stores. The large space is empty, save for a young boy playing on the floor with his toy car. When Ray flicks on the lights, it becomes clear that the child is a sculpture, a nude rendered in a smooth alabaster white. The surface detail is spare: gently protruding ribs, some grooves for hair. The boy’s gaze is cast downward toward the car, compelling the viewer to kneel next to him ...
  November 2007 Julie L. Belcove , Charles Ray , W Magazine
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• Charles Ray began his career as a craft-conscious Conceptual joker tackling different sculptural properties: scale, gravity, weight and illusion. His early work includes a photograph of him trussed and tied to a rather slender tree branch, a black cube filled to the brim with printer’s ink and a series of objects on a table that rotate slowly and almost imperceptibly, creating an unstill life. He later filmed a young woman standing as motionless as a mannequin on a revolving turntable, wearing a succession of rudimentary garments he had made. He has made a toy fire truck the size of a ...
  November 30, 2007 Roberta Smith, Art in Review: Charles Ray , The New York Times
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• CHARLES RAY DID IN FACT STEAL the thirty-two-foot-long fallen tree that inspired his recent sculpture Hinoki, just as rumor has it. After spotting the tree in a California field, Ray tried and failed to acquire it through legitimate channels. Not to be deterred, he returned to the site, chain saw in tow. Over a series of trips, he transported the tree, in hundreds of pieces, back to his studio in Los Angeles. Thus commenced Hinoki's decadelong backstory--protracted even for Ray, who often spends years on his intricately fabricated sculptures in order to achieve just the right subtle-yet-delirious mimetic shift. Hinoki ...
  Sept, 2007 Rachel Kushner, 1000 words: Charles Ray talks about Hinoki , ArtForum
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• If a tree falls in an art gallery and the entire art world is there to hear it, what kind of sound does it make? That's one question that comes to mind in the presence of Charles Ray's strange, evocative new sculpture, "Hinoki," which inaugurates a second space opened by Regen Projects. It's Ray's first L.A. gallery show in a decade, and he's spent the better part of those last 10 years working on this monumental piece. The sculpture is a hand-crafted doppelganger of a hollow, 32-foot-long oak log the artist stumbled upon rotting away in a field. One answer ...
  May 11, 2007 Christopher Knight , A wooden creation, as lovely as a tree , Los Angeles Times
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• A fallen tree inspired Charles Ray, who liked the way the elements had sculpted it. With Japanese woodcarvers, he made a re-creation. On a break from installing his exhibition at Regen Projects, artist Charles Ray sits in the gallery, shoulders hunched, hands clasped in his lap. Soft-spoken and withdrawn, he comes to life only when he gets up to walk around his latest project: a life-size sculpture of a fallen tree, carved in wood. "I'm interested in where you find yourself in relation to the work," he says, "so your perception of it changes. Scale changes as you move through ...
  May 5, 2007 Sharon Mizota, Looks almost like Mother Nature's , Los Angeles Times
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• Charles Ray is an anachronism. In 1978 the artist presented a wall-mounted sculpture entitled Clock Man, featuring a large generic clock face painted on an oversize wooden box. Ray was situated in the box, and his legs dangled like ridiculous pendulums from holes in the bottom of it. The piece followed from a number of works in which Ray's body was used to activate or complete a sculpture. Several of these were preserved as photographs: Untitled (1973) is a black-and-white photograph of Ray tied to a cantilevered tree branch; Plank Piece I—II (1973) is a photographic diptych that documents the ...
  February 2007 Michael Ned Hote, Slow Dissolve , Art Review
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• Charles Ray is one of the most interesting artists alive. He is a pretty good curator too, judging by the organization of this beautiful, spare and mysterious show of works by three sculptors and a photographer. Mr. Ray is known for offbeat perceptual effects in his own sculpture, like one of a naked family with the two young children enlarged so they stand as tall as their parents. But no special effects are in play in the relatively traditional sculptures on view here. First you encounter one of Giacometti's skinny and crusty standing-woman sculptures. Some distance away is a massive ...
  July 7, 2006 Ken Johnson, Art in Review; A Four Dimensional Being Writes Poetry on a Field With Sculptures , The New York Times
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• The beginning of this essay is the problem of Genesis; time starts before space, and time is very easy to understand until you try to explain it. Space of course has no meaning outside of time, which is its experience. This art show is about space, which I guess is like saying my watch is about time. Actually I do not wear a watch but like you have lived in both space and time. For centuries philosophers and scientists have studied the inscrutability of both these phenomena. Saint Augustine said that time is very easy to understand until you try ...
  June 28, 2006 Charles Ray, A four dimensional being writes poetry on a field with sculptures , Matthew Marks Gallery
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• NEAR the entrance to "Ecstasy," the winning new thematic group exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art's Little Tokyo warehouse space, Berlin artist Klaus Weber has installed a three-tiered fountain made from Victorian cut-glass. Water gaily burbles from the otherwise rather cheesy-looking fountain, splashing down the crystal tiers into a square concrete pool surrounded by tempered-glass walls. According to a signed certificate hanging on a nearby wall, the fountain's water is laced with LSD. The most potent psychotropic substance known to science, it was produced for the artist in a British homeopathy lab. The fountain is a signature piece for ...
  October 11, 2005 Christopher Knight, Take a mind excursion , Los Angeles Times
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• IN college I heard a story about Giacometti and Picasso walking down a decrepit street in Paris. Picasso, looking up at the ramshackle buildings, asked, ''How can these buildings possibly continue to stand?'' ''Force of habit,'' Giacometti replied. I found the comment hilarious, but as I grew older and began to struggle to get my own sculptures to stand, I started to wonder, ''What does the guy know that I don't?'' Since then I've kept coming back to Giacometti's work. With each return I get a new insight, a fresh experience, but also something harder to articulate: a sense that ...
  Sunday, October 7, 2001 Charles Ray, Thinking of Sculpture As Shaped by Space , The New York Times
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• Mannequins are images of ourselves with the guts ripped out; we dress them up to display our merchandise. Charles Ray’s latest work Fashions (1996) and fashion designer Martin Margiela’s spring collection both focus on the living model as mannequin. The relationship between real and imitated body pushes the envelope of each, creating worlds in which the living and the unliving slip back and forth, begging the question of what is actual and what is fabricated. Fashion and art inspire the possibility of an alternative reality: a world whose frame is drawn between our consciousness and representation.
  May 6, 1997 Yvette Brackman, Charles Ray , Frieze
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• As I was getting off the uptown #6 train I spotted Charles Ray buying subway tokens at the booth. He was looking just like one of his self-portrait sculptures. We were both heading to meet each other at the ‘95 Whitney Biennial to see his new sculpture and to record a conversation between us over lunch. On the way there, Charles told me how he was still shaken by a near fatal incident that occurred while he was exploring a rocky sea cave near Los Angeles in his Zodiac raft. Heavy waves had tossed his raft up against the caves’ ...
  Summer 1995 Paul Dickerson, Charles Ray , BOMB
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• I use forms that are images of men and animals. My interest is not in the identity of the image, but rather in the feeling of human duality and contradiction that the sculptures generate. These feelings are communicated through the use of constructed elements made of wood, concrete, or steel. Briefly, in these paragraphs, I will explain the sculptural and personal sources of my work. Psychoanalysis traces human trauma to a conflict between eros and death.
  Jun 21 1980, Charles Ray, Charles Ray , New Orleans Review
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