Matthew Marks is pleased to announce an exhibition of two new sculptures by Charles Ray, the next exhibition in his galleries at 1062 North Orange Grove and 7818 Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles.

Baled Truck, shown here for the first time, is a sculpture of a truck that has been compressed into a rectangular block. Machined from solid stainless steel, the sculpture weighs twelve tons. In Ray’s words, “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.”

Mime is a sculpture of a reclining male figure carved from solid blocks of aluminum. For the first time Ray has left visible the seams between these blocks, as well as the tool paths normally welded and polished out in the finishing. He has written of the figure, “Is his sleep a form of miming or is he miming sleep?”

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. This past summer the Kunstmuseum Basel mounted an exhibition of fifteen sculptures made since 1997, and an expanded version will open at the Art Institute of Chicago in May 2015.

Charles Ray will be on view at 1062 North Orange Grove and 7818 Santa Monica Boulevard from November 1 to December 20, 2014, Tuesday through Saturday, from 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM.

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