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The widely celebrated, prolific San
Francisco artist Rex Ray opens an exhibition of New Works at Michael
Martin Galleries.
You have seen this colorist’s botanical arabesques: he has
caught your eye all over San Francisco in the most sophisticated locales, including the Slanted Door and the W San Francisco.
Rex Ray’s stunning design genius has brought him
to the attention of the most judicious culturati: he has designed
for David Bowie, Matmos, Bill Graham Presents as well
as Apple, Sony Music, City Lights Publishers, among many others.
His collage work, paintings and drawings have been
exhibited in major museums and galleries world wide, including San
Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Yerba Buena
Center for the Arts in San Francisco, Michael Martin Galleries,
Gallery 16, New Langton Arts, and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions.
CV
EDUCATION
BFA, San Francisco Art Institute, 1988
SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2009
Turner Carroll Gallery, Santa Fe, NM
Gallery 16, San Francisco, CA
Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Denver, CO
Gallery T, Denver, CO
Conduit Gallery, Dallas, TX
2006
Conduit Gallery, Dallas, Texas
Michael Martin Galleries, San Francisco, CA
2005
Gallery 16, San Francisco, Ca
Gensler & Associates, San Francisco, Ca
2004
Rule Gallery, Denver, CO
2003
Michael Martin Galleries, San Francisco, CA
Gallery 16, San Francisco
2002
ModernBook/Gallery494, Palo Alto, Ca
2001
Michael Martin Galleries, San Francisco, CA
2000
Peterson Hall Gallery, Scottsdale, AZ
Gallery 16, San Francisco
1999
Architects & Heroes, San Francisco
1998
Gallery 16, San Francisco
1996
Gallery 16, San Francisco
1994
Monster Truck Rally, Southern Exposure, San Francisco
1992
One Man Show, Hassel Haeseler Gallery Denver, Co
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2005
Recent California Abstraction, Monterey Museum of Modern Art, Ca
Neo Mod, Crocker Museum, Sacramento, Ca
Blobjects, San Jose Museum of Modern Art
Belles Letters, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
2004
Conduit Gallery, Dallas Texas AD2004,
The Lab, San Francisco
2003
Gallery 16, San Francisco
2002
Fascination: The Bowie Show, Gallery 16, San Francisco, Ca
Skulls, Academy of Arts & Sciences, San Francisco, Ca
Home, Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco, Ca
2001
I-5 Resurfacing: Four Decades of Ca. Art, San Diego Museum of Art
Velocity, Seattle, WA
West Coasting, Gotham, London
2000
Pierogi Traveling Exhibit, Yerba Buena Center For The Arts, San Francisco
Michael Martin Gallery, London
Abstraction: Raucous to Refined, Bedford Center for the Arts, Walnut Creek, CA
Alone, New Langton Arts, San Francisco
1999
Bay Area Now 2, Yerba Buena Center For The Arts, San Francisco
Snowflakes, Drawings at Four walls, San Francisco
1998
SAP, San Francisco Limn Gallery, San Francisco
1997
Time Zero, ESP, San Francisco
1995
Wild Side, LACE, Los Angeles
In a Different Light, University Art Museum, Berkeley
Piece, Nine Artists Consider Yoko Ono, Kiki, San Francisco
Flagging the 21st Century, Capp Street Project, San Francisco
1994
Science Fair, Southern Exposure, San Francisco
For Your Pleasure, Intersection for the Arts, San Francisco
Bong Hits, Kiki, San Francisco
Press
Rex Ray at Museum of Contemporary Art Denver
Curated by Cydney Payton
For Rex Ray, the joy of making and viewing art is his continuing motivation. Drawing inspiration from his acknowledged influences—the Arts and Crafts Movement, Abstract Expressionism, organic and hard-edged abstraction, pattern and textile design, and Op Art—Ray playfully combines these formalist concepts with decorators’ tips gleaned from lowbrow publications and sources of popular culture in his pursuit to create beautiful things. Gracefully bridging the gap between fine and applied art, he distinguishes himself in each realm.
As a fine artist, Rex Ray works in a wide range of media, including painting, collage, print works, and photography. His collages grew out of the simple pleasure of cutting shapes from magazine pages, assembling and gluing them to paper to create visually pleasing works that have since developed into sophisticated resin- covered panels. In his large-scale canvas paintings, like the one on view at MCA DENVER, he conceives abstracted landscapes from biomorphic shapes and distinct color combinations as a fresh adaptation of an aesthetic that sympathizes with twentieth-century Modernism.
Ray’s work exudes beauty with a subversive edge that stems from an attitude grounded in alternative subculture. He was an early admirer of punk and new wave music. Music holds a special place in his life. A former record store employee and devoted collector, he has worked with leading contemporary musicians, contributing designs for many album covers and concert posters for artists such as Radiohead, Björk, Nine Inch Nails, Deee-Lite, and David Bowie.
Rex Ray was born in Germany in 1956. He lives and works in San Francisco’s Mission District. Before moving to California in 1981, he was a longtime resident of Colorado Springs and he still maintains his connection to Colorado. In 1988, he received a BFA from San Francisco Art Institute, CA. His paintings, collages, and designs have been widely exhibited at galleries and museums, including San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA, San Jose Museum of Modern Art, CA, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA. He is an accomplished graphic designer with a client list that includes Apple, Sony Music, and The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, NY.
Glen Helfand
7.17.05
In the art world, design is a troublesome concept: purists will tell you that design is too close to "real life," too "utilitary" to adorn a gallery's walls. Rex Ray, who's also well known for his graphic design work, is that rare artist who manages to maintain credibility with both his commercial and his gallery projects. He has an uncommon facility with visual balance and slightly barbed beauty, which are in full evidence in this expansive solo exhibition. The centerpiece of the show is a wall covered with dozens of collages. These modest works on paper are composed of images and text (surgeon general's warnings, splashy headlines) from glossy magazines that have been cut into ovals, squares, and vaguely atomic-age shapes and arranged into mesmerizing and pattern-intensive abstractions. The fact that these are recycled from the finished product of graphic designers for mass media magazines adds a sly irony to the project. Elsewhere, Ray displays paintings that employ similarly 1950's-styled organic shapes and collaged elements that sometimes bring to mind early paintings by Lari Pittman, another artist with designer roots. In a pair of other recent oil paintings, Ray expands his vision by humanizing a grid structure with thick, finger paint-like applications of vibrant orange and green. The electric quality of the paint bears some relationship to the artist's use of digital media -- another hot button in the art world -- here well illustrated with a suite of luscious computer-generated Iris prints that exude the almost cosmological glamour of a rain-soaked street reflecting colored city lights. Like many of the other works on display, these reveal that Ray may blur boundaries between media, but he can seemingly effortlessly squeeze out images with a universal appeal.
Michael Paglia
Westword.com, 10.2004
One of the weirdest twists in contemporary art over the last quarter-century -- other than increased interest in boring videos and self-indulgent performances -- is the way in which beauty has come to be denigrated. Today's art world is suspicious of beauty, and to say something is decorative is to make a pejorative observation. Conversely, ugliness is regarded as serious, and to call a work difficult is to praise it. How irrational. If I were searching for reason, however, I'd go to T-shirt slogans way before I'd go to someone in the art scene.
Luckily, I'm not the only one who sees beauty as still relevant to the fine arts, and despite the countervailing tendency to embrace ugliness, being beautiful is again on the rise in art circles. This makes sense, because beauty is a viewer-friendly attribute, and people who actually buy art rather than simply talk about it want something that looks good. After all, if they were more interested in art theory than in art itself, they'd be buying books, not paintings. All the theory in the world can't transform ugly crap into something worthwhile -- or, rather, something I'd be interested in devoting time to discussing or looking at.
No, I like beautiful things, although I have a fairly inclusive concept of what constitutes beauty (as longtime readers of this column will agree). I know a lot of people will be angered by what I've just said. But like art theorists who see excellence as being elitist, artists who hate beauty are motivated by the fact that they're incapable of achieving it.
What's brought these thoughts to mind is the gorgeous Rex Ray: Recent Work, currently at Rule Gallery and one of the best shows in memory. The Ray collages are all about beauty, which is more than enough for me. "Some have criticized my work as being too decorative," says Ray, "but I don't agree, because I'm interested in having people like them." And, happily, they do.
The artist will be familiar to some because he used to live in Colorado, and in the early '90s, he had a solo at the now-closed Hassel-Haeseler Gallery. Others may recognize his name from magazines like Metropolitan Home and Dwell, where his rugs have been featured. Still others will know him from his graphic designs for Apple Computer, Bill Graham Productions and David Bowie, as well as other contemporary musicians. Ray has designed many CD covers, including several for Bowie, and has also done collaborative prints with the rock legend.
Ray, who's had multiple careers as a fine artist, a designer and a graphic artist, was born on a U.S. Army base in Germany in 1956. "I was a little military brat," he says. When he was three, his family moved to this country, but returned to Germany when he was still in elementary school. "Because my mother's family was German," Ray explains, "we lived half the time on an Army base and half the time in my mother's village."
In Germany, Ray became interested in high-style European design, especially the stuff coming out of Scandinavia and Italy that he saw in the shops, and in American contemporary art that he saw in magazines. "I did childish versions of Andy Warhols and hung them up in the hallways of our apartment building," he says with a laugh. In 1969, his family moved to Colorado Springs, where he spent the next twelve years. At Mitchell High School, Ray had the distinction of taking more art classes than any other student -- but academic subjects were another story. "I had to complete high school over the summer and took a class from Skip Munday at Coronado," he recalls. "And even though I had many art teachers, he's the only one I remember. He did things like have us do drawings in a dark room."
He took the pseudonym "Rex Ray" from a vaporizer he found in a Colorado Springs thrift store. "I have a warehouse full of Rex-Ray appliances," he says, "because everyone thinks I'd never heard of them, and they give them to me. I wish they would stop."
I first met Ray in the late '70s through neo-pop artist John Haeseler. It's hard to believe today that there was a cutting-edge art scene in Colorado Springs then, but there was. "We really were doing wild things -- the whole mail-art movement was going, and John Haeseler got me into that," says Ray. The group's center was the art department at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, where Ray was enrolled.
Ray and Haeseler both threw themselves into alternative methods of production, including rubber-stamping and photocopying. It was heady stuff for the times, and Ray soon realized that while there was a lot of interesting
art going on, there was no audience for it in Colorado Springs. He decided to seek his fortune in California and moved to Los Angeles in 1981. But just weeks after arriving, he took a short trip to San Francisco, fell in love with the city and relocated there, where he remains to this day.
Ray's day job in Colorado Springs had been at Budget Tapes & Records, which is how he met Haeseler, an avid music fan. The two were in the throes of punk and new wave (you didn't expect them to be into classical, did you?). "John Haeseler was buying all this cool music, and that's how we got to know one another," Ray recalls. Even back then, Ray was very interested in music packaging. So after landing in San Francisco, he used his experience to get a job at Tower Records in its pre-chain incarnation. "I applied to the San Francisco Art Institute the day I was fired at Tower," he says.
He completed his BFA in 1988 and went on to the graduate program, but dropped out after discovering the school was into the anti-beautiful trip. "I was doing encaustic paintings," Ray remembers, "and I wanted them to be beautiful, and that led to cruel and vicious critiques." But the artist has gotten the last laugh, considering that his career is more distinguished than those of most of his former teachers and fellow students.
While still attending SFAI, Ray got a job at City Lights Bookstore, a gig that led to many of his graphics commissions. Because of City Lights, he became the designer for the High Risk imprint, which put out a series of books that dealt with authors who had AIDS. "We would race to get something published before the author died," he says woefully. It was at the bookstore that Ray met Bowie. "We really hit it off and talked for hours," says Ray, telling the story of how a Bill Graham executive went to Bowie and asked him to autograph a Ray- designed poster as a birthday surprise for the artist; Bowie told the suit that he and Ray were friends, and he wanted Ray to autograph a poster for him! "My status at [Bill Graham Productions] changed considerably after that," says Ray with a guffaw.
All of these influences -- from his childhood in Germany to his early work in Colorado Springs, his record-store jobs, his experiences at SFAI and his work as a graphic designer -- come together in the spectacular collages that Ray displays at Rule. The show includes literally hundreds of pieces, many on paper, others on board and canvas.
On the south wall of the gallery, Ray has created an installation called "Wall of Sound" that's made up of nearly 500 collages on small sheets of paper, which are hung end-to-end in what is called library style. The collages meander over the building's structural supports, creating a wave. These pieces were quickly and casually done, with Ray using images cut out of magazines. But the pictures in them are mostly obscured, the fragments used almost exclusively as abstract shapes.
The paper collages are essentially sketches for the ones on board and canvas, and scores of board collages are displayed salon-style on the north wall. In these, Ray uses papers that he decorated with paint and transfer printing, instead of appropriating the ready-made colors and forms found on magazine pages. Although all the collages are connected stylistically, here he employs an array of forms, including ovals, stripes and some shapes that are indescribable.
Most of these pieces have a mid-century, modernist feel, but Ray chafes when people call them retro -- and I think he's right in denying that label. Rather than looking retro, they actually have a neo-modern character and couldn't have been done until now. One of the aspects that makes them look new, and not old, is the high- gloss, poured-resin surface they share.
Ray has an instinctual sense for composition and a seemingly inexhaustible talent for great formal relationships. His skill as a colorist is remarkable. His color combinations are incredibly successful and unpredictable: yellow paired with pink, acid green with sky blue, and on and on. Many have called his colors psychedelic, and that's not too far off. Nor is it surprising from an artist working in San Francisco who also does rock posters.
The three large pieces on canvas, although obviously related to the paper collages and the ones on board, differ in several ways. While the other pieces are abstract, these are what Ray calls landscapes. They're not landscapes in the traditional sense, though, and instead are highly abstracted botanicals. In "Agglutinatus," a line of imaginary plants rises from the bottom of the picture. The influence of Venetian glass, particularly Flavio Poli's designs, Mexican art and even German kitsch is easy to see in the canvas works. These really look
psychedelic, even more so than the smaller abstracts. Because the canvas resists the poured resin, Ray has sealed these pieces in matte varnish, which creates a very different surface effect that allows the character of the paper to show through.
It would be impossible to overstate how good Rex Ray is, because it's fabulous. Trust me, you don't want to miss it. And if you went to the opening, go back just for those last two canvas pieces.
Mark Van Proyen
Artnet, 11.2005
There is no doubt about the digital provenance of the seven large collage works and other miscellaneous works in Rex Ray's ebullient exhibition at Gallery 16 -- Ray was one of the very first artists in the Bay Area to incorporate digital output into his work, which in the past has included sets of limited-edition digital prints. Such prints were nowhere in evidence in this recent exhibition, which was made up of large and brightly-colored collages/paintings that feature the careful geometric deployment of elegant shapes of carefully cut-up computer printer output that seemed to have been specifically developed for the purpose at hand.
Most often, these seemed like elaborate variations on the themes of Illustrator gradients and elegantly torqued postscript geometries seeking a synthesis of the mechanical and the biomorphic, creating tentacle-like shapes that in turns bulged and tapered. When massed together into clustered figure-ground configurations, these shapes take on the attributes of architectural forms floating in an ethereal space where gravity is optional, each disengaging the ideas of mass and volume only to reconfigure them as hyper-decorative quasi-gestural hieroglyphics signifying a disembodied bodiliness.
There is an eerie post-human association that the viewer can make between these works and Matisse's late cut-outs -- in the case of the earlier master's work, spontaneity, sleight-of-hand and a devil-may-care improvisation were at the very forefront of the work's creation, while in Ray's more strategically elaborated efforts, the viewer witnesses an intriguing dialectic of pure design, manual dexterity (the gluing of the paper shapes on the large canvas supports is consistently flawless) and inventive pictorial arrangements that also seem to have some elements of improvisation to them, although, like the efforts of an accomplished jazz soloist, those improvisatory elements cooperate in a cunning dialogue with tight and regularized compositional structures.
Steven Skov Holt, Fluid Blobs in Motion, 2005
Blobjects and Beyond; The New Fluidity in Design
San Jose Museum of Modern Art
The artwork of San Francisco graphic designer Rex Ray has become a prolific mediation on the abstract and dynamic nature of fluid forms. Begun at night simply as a personal and therapeutic visual antidote to his highly self-edited, computer-based commercial work during the day, his art projects (small-scale paintings and collages now numbering in the thousands) came from humble origins; scissors, paste and fashion magazines. But Ray brings an unusually tight sense of craft and precision to the compositions of these smallish, highly colorful, and always playful artworks. The result is a fusion of art and design sensibilities. Biomorphic-, teardrop-, and nature-based forms comprise the bulk of Ray's vocabulary, and paintings such as 'The New Water' appear to have been created mid-drip. Its immediate communication of the joy of movement is balanced against its momentarily arrested state; the delight of composing just for the sake of composing is immediately apparent. Ray creates forms of indeterminate origins-familiar but not identifiable-that offer the viewer a sense of spontaneous liberation. The question is not why Ray does such things, but why most other graphic designers and painters do not.
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