Those who have seen a work by Charles Ray will not forget it. If it was his 15 meter long toy fire engine, which was parked on Madison Avenue on Manattan last spring, or the black and white photographs from a performance in 1973, where the artists hangs like a rag-doll on a wooden board.

And who could avoid coming back from a visit at Documenta in Kassel, the Post-Human exhibition, or the Venice- and Whitney Biennales without a sculpture by Charles Ray etched, not just onto the retina, but also into the mind: the shining white cube, which turns out to consist of unconceivably 7 1/2 tons of steel; the elegant giant woman "Dressed to kill" in the fall collection of 1991; the naked family standing hand in hand, a three year old, a six year old, Mom and Dad, all of them the same length - 130 cm; or the realistic sex orgie where it turns out that all the participants are the same person - namely, the artist. Perhaps, a commentary to the mechanisms of creativity, an image of the conditions of sexuality in the times of AIDS, or perhaps just a literal respons to an aggressive "Go fuck yourself"?

Yes, maybe it is the literalness in Charles Ray's sculptures that make them so unforgettable? Even if his work is what we usually call representational, he himself thinks of them as abstract sculptures. They are not metaphors for anything, just very direct, "physical events which set off complex reactions".

At the same time as Charles Ray's sculptures smoothly have avoided all attempts of labeling, whether it has been "the body" or "L. A. Bad Boy", it has been hard to get a more profound understanding of what makes this artist to one of the most interesting in contemporary art. But, on second thoughts, the reason is quite simpel: this is the first large museum exhibition with his work! In competition with a number of the leading museums in the world, Rooseum was entrusted with the task of organizing a large exhibition with 23 works from the period 1973-93.