For the final sculpture, he uses a range of materials – stainless steel is a favourite, not cast but machined from solid blocks. After taking a 3D scan of a model, he and his studio make clay patterns to decide upon scale and details, a step that can take years. It comes forward and I go backwards.’ His sculptural process is a combination of handcrafted and industrial. ‘I don’t go and study Archaic sculpture, or Renaissance sculpture,’ he explains. When in Paris, he can often be found visiting the Louvre. His work interacts with the history of Western sculpture, from the Greeks to Rodin. In 1981, he moved to Los Angeles to teach at UCLA, and he has lived there ever since. He studied sculpture at the University of Iowa, where he was exposed to the high modernism of Anthony Caro, an enormous influence on his approach to space. They sent him to a Catholic military high school at age 13. He was born in 1953 in Chicago, where his parents ran a commercial art school. Courtesy Matthew Marks Galleryĭressed casually in dark jeans and layered T-shirts, with a wool beanie cap, Ray is both shy and Midwestern-friendly.

Ray, Young man, 2012, Pinault Collection © Charles Ray. (For example, Plank Piece I and II (1973) are photos of him hanging lifelessly, pinned between a plank of wood and the wall.) The Bourse de Commerce includes seven of his most recent pieces, shown to the public for the very first time. They are not chronological, but the Pompidou show includes some of Ray’s early works from the 1970s when he used his own body as a material. The exhibitions are complementary, with different curators, and a ticket to one gives viewers a reduced ticket price to the other, a brisk ten-minute walk away. For a man who works slowly, completing maybe four pieces a year, this represents more than one-third of his total sculptural output. He is making up for lost time with a double retrospective: 21 works at the Centre Pompidou and 17 at the Bourse de Commerce. ‘I believe if a sculpture can move you physically it can move you intellectually,’ he says.Īt 68, Ray has established himself as one of the most important sculptors alive, so it is surprising that he has never before had a solo museum exhibition in Paris. Ray wants the viewer to get down on the ground, too, to feel the boy’s presence and the floor as an ‘infinite plane of existence’ linking past, present and future. Stretching out his arm, he shows how he tried different poses – for ‘a couple of years’ – before selecting one for his sculpture, The New Beetle (2006), which portrays a boy playing with a toy car. Charles Ray gets down on the floor of the Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection and shifts to one thigh, seated like a child.

Ray charles a portrait of ray rar