Day 349 - Charles Ray horse

June 19, 2923

 Gallery 917 holds the Philip Guston painting I wrote about earlier (day 341).  Gallery 918 is home to just one work: a huge (perhaps 16 feet long and 10 feet high) granite bas-relief by a contemporary American sculptor, Charles Ray, who was born in 1953. The bas-relief, sculpted in 2019, is entitled “Two Horses,” which are seen in full-body profile. But you have to look closely to see the second horse, whose head and neck are in much lower relief than the horse in the foreground, and whose torso is almost completely obscured. The main giveaway that more than one horse is depicted are the six hooves at the bottom of the image. The striations in the granite at the bottom of the relief suggest that the horses are fording a stream, with water  covering their lower legs. The sculptor has done a remarkable job of capturing the front horse’s bony legs, the musculature of its shoulder, the sinews of its neck, the feathery texture of its mane. 

The caption notes that horses have been a subject of sculpture from antiquity to the present. It goes on to say that for Ray, “it is the notion of an intrinsic life form embedded within inanimate matter that lies at the heart of this work.” But isn’t this true of all sculptors who try to create lifelike images? I think of  Michelangelo 's unfinished "Slaves," where the artist's struggle to wrest life from marble is especially evident.