The American sculptor Charles Ray is perhaps best known for provocative, hyperreal sculptures such as Boy with Frog (2008), which notoriously was removed after it was installed in Venice in 2013. But over the course of a five-decade career the artist has worked in many genres and mediums, from classicism to minimalism and from fibreglass to steel, as this retrospective at the Met in New York (31 January–5 June) makes plain. The display spans Ray’s early photographs from the 1970s and recent sculptures, two of which have not been displayed together; it also brings together, for the first time, the series of sculptures Ray has based on Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Find out more from the Met’s website.
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Untitled (1973; printed 1989), Charles Ray. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery; © Charles Ray
Sarah Williams (2021), Charles Ray. Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery; © Charles Ray
Chicken (2007), Charles Ray. Glenstone Museum, Potomac. Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery; © Charles Ray
A copy of ten marble fragments of the Great Eleusinian Relief (2017), Charles Ray. Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery; © Charles Ray
Boy with Frog (2009), Charles Ray. Philadelphia Museum of Art. Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery; © Charles Ray