When Vienna meets Man Ray

VIENNA.- Man Ray (1890-1976) is renowned by the great majority today as a photographer. But in fact he was one of the most productive and versatile artists of the twentieth century. While he has long been celebrated as an icon in the USA, in Europe scanty attention has been paid to his complete oeuvre until now.

Man Ray was born in 1890 as Emmanuel Radnitzky in Philadelphia and died in 1976 in Paris at the age of 86; in his delight in experiment and sheer unending wealth of ideas he shaped how and what is seen as "art" today. Even during his schooldays Man Ray was fascinated by technical drawing. The exhibition starts out with Man Ray's early work, hardly known in Europe, which includes abstract-technical studies as well as the paintings he produced during his stay in the artists' colony in Ridgefield (1913-1915) and are strongly influenced by Fauvism and Cubism, according to Artdaily.com

Collecting over 200 objects from around the world including photographs, paintings, collages, short films and sculptures, the Kunstforum offers a comprehensive overview of Ray’s work over the years, setting the record straight on the multi-talented creator, according Metropole.at

Man Ray is still mostly known for his photographs. But the exhibition, for which Ortner-Kreil secured some very hard-to-get loans, is in keeping with some previous retrospectives in reviewing Man Ray’s discursive career which still has often left him slightly marginalized in art history. The exhibition shows his fertile mind and practice and aims to correct some of that narrative. ‘I paint what I cannot photograph,' the artist said in 1973, according to Culturezhon.com