Fall '91

Many of Charles Ray’s best-known works are remakes of objects and people taken from the real world. Small but significant alterations to familiar situations give Ray’s practice a disquieting tension. Cloaked in simplicity, his often humorous creations comment on sculpture’s history, from its austere formal issues to its surreal psychological consequences. Ray imbues the tenets of classical sculpture, such as beauty, proportion, and facture, with a sly drama by inserting slippages, imperfections, or over-perfections in the physical makeup of his works. Fall ’91 depicts a woman standing with her weight mostly on one foot in a common contrapposto pose. Modeled on a mannequin scaled to eight feet tall, the sculpture looms large in a pink power suit fashionable in the fall of 1991. The result is both physically and psychologically daunting.