Charles Ray

About

Matthew Marks is pleased to announce an exhibition of two new sculptures by Charles Ray, the next exhibition in his gallery at 523 West 24th Street. 

Baled Truck began with an old pick-up truck compressed into a rectangular block. As Ray has pointed out, “Baled Truck is a sculpture that commemorates solidity and compression — as in memory, what seems assembled from the past is in reality carved from the present.” Reflecting the artist’s meticulous process, Baled Truck took more than six years to complete. Machine-carved from solid stainless steel, it is nearly ten feet long and weighs thirteen tons. 

Girl on Pony, shown here for the first time, is a sculptural relief machined from a solid block of aluminum. Seven feet high, five feet wide, and four inches deep, it depicts a young girl on horseback with reins in her hand, but it does not reveal the head, tail, or legs of the animal she rides. Ray made his first relief in 2007, and Girl on Pony is his fifth sculpture in this format. “The conventions inherent in a relief are both interesting and useful to me,” Ray explains. “An illusion is maintained by careful orchestration of both pictorial and sculptural elements.”