Le Baiser de Man Ray

Bruce Silverstein Gallery is pleased to present Le Baiser de Man Ray, an exhibition of important photographs exemplifying the artist’s unbridled imagination and love for experimentation. Featuring close to thirty works spanning the artist’s early to mid-career and culled from the Gallery’s extensive archive, Le Baiser de Man Ray is a compelling display of wonders that will surely surprise, fascinate, and seduce even the most ardent Man Ray aficionado.

While much has been written about Man Ray’s groundbreaking career and importance to the Dada and Surrealist movements, his oeuvre is impossible to categorize due to his tireless experimentation with new techniques and ideas and his disdain for the notion of a signature style. What is consistent, however, is the artist behind the work—a true creator imbued with wit, passion, and a love for all things original.  

Although he initially emerged as a modernist painter and a member of the Dada movement’s American branch in New York, Man Ray’s frustration with the constraints of the commercial American art scene eventually brought him to Paris in 1921. In Paris, Man Ray’s groundbreaking techniques that blended art and science, such as solarization and the invention of rayographs, presented him as a modern-renaissance man. He once said, “Life is an instant […] there’s no time to do two things alike;” Le Baiser de Man Ray, with a cross-section of remarkable photographs and photo montages, demonstrates the artist’s extraordinary quest for “newness” while representing a unique view of his creative output. Included are seminal examples of his early film stills, solarized nudes, ready-mades, self-portraits, Rayographs, and masterworks of Surrealism, from the known to the newly discovered.