Over the course of his storied career, Man Ray created work spanning a variety of mediums: painting, photography, sculpture, printmaking, film, poetry, and prose. His work aligned variously with Cubism, Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism—all the while retaining its own distinct style. Man Ray is most noted for his profound body of photographic works, which encompass fashion, portraiture, and technical experimentation such as solarisation and the widely celebrated photograms or 'rayographs': the artist created these compelling images without a camera, arranging found objects onto sheets of photosensitive paper and exposing them to light. The rayographs wavered between representation and concept, epitomising the indeterminate forces that have come to define his vast oeuvre. Alluding to relationships between the real and the fictive, Man Ray commanded a deft mastery over the liminal territory between the abstract and figurative form.
Read MoreMan Ray was born in 1890 in Philadelphia, and died in 1976 in Paris. His work is held in the collections of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and Israel Museum, Jerusalem, among others. Recent solo exhibitions include Alias Man Ray: The Art of Reinvention, Jewish Museum, New York (2009–2010); Man Ray Portraits, National Portrait Gallery, London (2013); and Man Ray—Human Equations, Phillips Collection, Washington, DC (2015).
Text courtesy Gagosian.
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Related Press Man Ray in LA: what happened when the pioneering artist hit Hollywood 16 January 2018, The Guardian In the autumn of 1940, Man Ray met a travelling tie salesman at a party in New York. The American artist had arrived back in the US earlier that summer, having spent nearly two decades in Paris. The salesman said he was planning a cross-country trip to Los Angeles; Man Ray decided to catch a lift.
