Deutsch
English
Background information
"Man RAY has always been received primarily as a photographer. He achieved widespread fame for his photographic portraits of artists and his cameraless rayographs of the 1920s. However, Man RAY painted, drew, designed, made films, designed objects, wrote typefaces, was also enthusiastic about typography, book and magazine design, and pursued a veritable career as an experimental fashion photographer for Harper's Bazaar and Vogue, as the exhibition at Kunstforum Wien demonstrated.
Content
The catalog publication accompanying the exhibition in Vienna shows how Man RAY made use of a variety of artistic media and techniques in an inventive and playful manner. A selection of some 170 key works from around the world, including paintings, photographs, objects, paper works, collages, assemblages, and experimental film, outlines the equally enigmatic and complex artistic personality of Man RAY and shows how - in congenial artistic complicity with Marcel Duchamp - he laid the foundation for how and what we consider 'art' today. The publication is supplemented by scholarly essays with statements by Hans Kupelwieser, Bruce Nauman, and James Welling, as well as a chronological collection of selected quotations from MAN RAY's autobiography instead of a conventional biography.