Charles ledray biography
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The Genius of Making It Small
For some twenty-five years, Charles LeDray has been surprising and delighting, and sometimes mystifying, the audience for contemporary art. Now fifty-six, LeDray is a kind of realist sculptor whose pieces—in part because his subjects are familiar but not what we would expect in a gallery setting, and in equal measure because he works with such small, essentially miniaturist sizes—have the power of making almost every object he handles seem new to our eyes.
When his art was getting underway, in the late 1980s, he altered the idea we generally have of stuffed animals. Using bears mostly, and sometimes designing them with their limbs askew or separated from their trunks, he gave them the distilled presence of purist, abstract sculpture, and this somehow made their plight seem as much inward and psychological as it was physical. Going on to work as a potter, he has exhibited large vertical glass display cases where on every glass shelf we see
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TENDER BUTTONS: THE ART OF CHARLES LeDRAY
THE NOISE OF ALL the fashioned objects existing in the world is incessant, a racket of fabrication, location, use, reuse, repair, value, and, in the least insistent of whispers, meaning. This ambient noise explains why the silence of an art gallery is not merely conventional, but pertains to its objects themselves. How many extraneous sounds must an artwork filter so its own particular tones may be heard? Is this why contemporary art that refers to use—the most strident of ämne declarations—must find contemporary tactics that dampen the din of usefulness?
Charles LeDray’s first solo New York show, in 1993 at the Tom Cugliani Gallery, consisted mostly of objects made of objects that resembled clothes. Clothing, even clothing with quotes around it, is risky to employ as an art ingredient because it is among the “noisiest” of object categories: immediately and universally recognizable yet culturally and
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Apr 27-Aug 12,2012
Tiny suits, miniature ceramic vessels in towering vitrines, hand-embroidered baseball caps, Charles LeDray’s work is a poetry of material, scale, and cultural resonance rich with history and emotion. Well known for his exquisitely crafted objects, working in a range of materials from fabric to human bone, LeDray’s work touches on loss, pathos, and absence. These objects, each exquisite in their separate ways, are also meticulously made by grabb, bringing awe to our experience of them, each object virtually singing or humming from beneath the crushing conceptual weight of the immense labor involved in their own creation.
Charles LeDray at The Bassis the artist’s first museum exhibition to follow his just-completed comprehensive survey exhibition workworkworkworkwork, which was organized by The Institute of Contemporary Art Boston and toured to The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
While workworkworkworkwork