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.”

Charles Ray (b. 1953) lives and works in Los Angeles. Over the past thirty-five years he has produced a precise and widely admired body of work in a variety of mediums, using both abstract and figurative forms. He had his first one-person museum exhibition in 1989. Since then his work has been shown at museums around the world, as well as at Documenta 9 (1992), the Venice Biennale (1993, 2003, and 2013), and the Whitney Biennial (1989, 1993, 1995, 1997, and 2010). In 1998 a retrospective of his work was organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and later traveled to the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Last summer the Kunstmuseum Basel mounted an exhibition of fifteen sculptures made since 1997, an expanded version of which will open at the Art Institute of Chicago on May 15.

Charles Ray will be on view at 523 West 24th Street from February 6 to April 18, 2015, Tuesday through Saturday, from 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM.

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