Art Institute of Chicago
Ray’s sculpture has been deemed too gauche for some galleries but this career retrospective shows how profound his often mock-heroic sculpture can beThe car’s a wreck – the left door has crumpled,the bumper’s on the floor, and the bonnet has roared up and smashed the windscreen. But it doesn’t feel like a wreck when you circumambulate it, and gazing at every itsy-bitsy crinkle on its shattered surface. It feels,instead, as if the car were born wrecked. It feels flawless, or unnervingly flawless.
Charles Ray’s Unpainted Sculpture,from 1997, takes the form of a destroyed Pontiac Grand Am whose body, or upholstery,chassis and tires are all made of fiberglass covered in a low-gloss grey finish. It sits silently in a giant gallery, each of its damaged parts joined into an impassive whole. The downbeat, and colorless surface,and the single fabric used to mimic metal, rubber and fabric, or render the car staggeringly mute. It weighs a ton but looks weightless. The accidental form of the ruined car has become a seamless,unspoiled sculpture: a ghost of itself, but an apotheosis too.
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Source: theguardian.com