LONDON.- Luxembourg + Co. opened the first retrospective exhibition of Joe Ray (b.1944) to be held outside of the United States. The exhibition spans across the gallery's London space and Frieze Masters art fair and is accompanied by a new monographic book.

Arriving in Los Angeles in 1963 as a young artist, Joe Ray witnessed the 1960s developments in space exploration and rocket technology, not only as an intense rivalry between the United States and the Soviets, but also as a more expansive context to pervasive civil unrest in the USA, and specifically in LA. "What might be the implications of reaching outer space? Will there be room to imagine a new social order?"

In the mid '60s, Ray began casting with resin, a new material for artists that (along with light), came to define Southern California's "Light and Space" movement. Ray began to reinterpret the formal concerns and ideals of Light and Space in order to engage with questions of personal, national, and even cosmological identity. Expressive of both the world of science and the mysterious realm of the spirit, his cast resin orbs, rings, and spheres, demonstrated painstaking craftsmanship as well as conjuring a wide range of metaphors.

By 1970, having won an award from LACMA, Joe Ray enrolled in the inaugural class at CalArts, where he received his B.A. in 1973 under the mentorship of Nam June Paik, Allan Kaprow, and John Baldessari. In the early 1970s he co-founded Studio Z, an avant-garde collective with fellow artists David Hammons and Senga Nengudi. His work soon developed a jargon that fluctuates between abstraction and figuration, grounded in his individual expression of the Southern California Light and Space movement, as well as the collective artistic activism that emerged from Studio Z.

Through the lens of Ray's ongoing and evolving practice, Space Race pays tribute to Ray's fundamentally humanistic and unique interpretation of light and space as a formal expression of a social reality.

An important protagonist in the story of the Los Angeles art scene for over fifty-five years, Joe Ray's paintings, sculpture, and photographs have been exhibited at MOCA, LACMA, The Broad, SFMOMA, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH), the Contemporary Art Center New Orleans (CACNO), and the Long Beach Museum of Art. His work is in the permanent collections of LACMA, The Broad, The AÏSHTI Foundation, and the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art (NEHMA), among others.