Charles Ray
Boy
1992
Not on view
Date
1992
Classification
Sculpture
Medium
Painted fiberglass, steel, fabric and glass
Dimensions
Overall: 71 1/2 × 39 1/4 × 20 1/2in. (181.6 × 99.7 × 52.1 cm)
Accession number
92.131a-h
Edition
Edition of 3
Credit line
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from Jeffrey Deitch, Bernardo Nadal-Ginard, and Penny and Mike Winton
Rights and reproductions
© artist or artist’s estate
With his sculpture Boy, Charles Ray transforms a recognizable, familiar subject—a clothed department store mannequin—into an unsettling figure. As in several of his key works, Ray manipulates scale to uncanny ends and uses illusionistic, provocative means to disrupt our customary experiences with ordinary objects. His “boy” stands as tall as a full-grown man (he is in fact the artist’s height), and the figure’s pose is possessed of an adult quality that more readily suggests the stance of a Roman orator than the informal manner of a child. Ray conjures the innocence of youth in the boy’s knee socks, short pants, and porcelain features, yet his realignment of scale and gesture renders that innocence puzzling, even threatening. With his pointing finger, the boy appears confrontational and accusatory, while his fusion of prepubescent and adult features treads close to the taboo territory of childhood sexuality.
