Charles Ray The first monographic exhibition devoted to Charles Ray in France, opening on 16 February 2022 at the Bourse de Commerce and the Centre Pompidou Co-presented by the Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection and the Centre Pompidou, this first-ever retrospective of Charles Ray’s work in France is unprecedented in size, taking place at both institutions, who conceived the show in close collaboration with the artist starting in 2018, and who are co-publishing its joint catalogue. Curated by Caroline Bourgeois, Curator at the Pinault Collection for the Bourse de Commerce — Pinault Collection, and by Jean-Pierre Criqui, Curator at the Musée National d’Art Moderne — Centre Pompidou for the Centre Pompidou. Born in 1953 in Chicago, Charles Ray began his career in minimalist art, gradually heading towards sculpture and representation in the 1990s, ultimately arriving at his trademark hyperrealism. Imbued with the history of statuary, from the Kouroi of Ancient Greece to the masters of the Renaissance and Baroque, and from Canova to Rodin and Giacometti, his nude statues, monochrome and smooth, made from steel, marble, and paper, reveal a questioning that is hurled into space, haunted by the notions of presence and incarnation.Turned into sculptures, the beings and everyday objects used as models disorient us with their changes in scale, seemingly imperceptible discrepancies, and transpositions. Horse and Rider (2014), which occupies the Forecourt of the Bourse de Commerce, is a perfect example of his oeuvre in this sense.The sculpture appropriates the traditions of equestrian statuary ultimately to subvert them: instead of a haughty rider depicted majestically in movement , we see the figure of the artist astride his mount, motionless, expressing a sense of melancholy.

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