Charles LeDray: workworkworkworkwork

Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston

Through Oct. 17

Charles LeDray “is one of our most distinctive artists, and one of our best,” said Holland Cotter in The New York Times. “A multi-disciplinarian of extraordinary range,” LeDray creates intricate sculptures and installations, usually on a miniaturized scale, that consist “almost entirely of objects scrupulously assembled by hand.” For his early-1990s breakthrough, workworkworkworkwork, LeDray crafted a tabletop re-creation of a sidewalk rummage sale. Hundreds of incredibly small books, shoes, shirts, and paintings sit on “handkerchief-size blankets.” A more recent work, Oasis, brings together almost 2,000 ceramic pots and bowls, each only about an inch high. “Exhibited together in a vitrine, they suggest the excavated remains of a dead, pint-size culture.” In his current retrospective, at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art, almost every installation is smaller than a kitchen table. But they’re “as monumental in concept as art gets.”

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

LeDray’s art is in many ways a throwback, said Sebastian Smee in The Boston Globe. In an age when many conceptual artists no longer create actual objects by hand, “there’s an atavistic appeal in LeDray’s displays of virtuosic skill and dedication.” It might take him three or four years to complete one of his tiny creations, each of which rewards a viewer’s own slow and careful study. “Some of the works are like epics, others are haikus.” His early work Flip-Flops creates a little end-of-summer scene with a pair of footwear hanging from a string. Party Bed reproduces a typical party scene in which guests’ coats get piled on the host’s bed. Together these miniature masterpieces add up to “the most beautiful, poignant, and witty show” the ICA has mounted in recent memory.