Man Ray. Nudes

On October 14, as part of this year’s Thessaloniki Photobiennale 2023 organized by the MOMus-Museum of Modern Art-Costakis Collection, the exhibition featuring the ‘Nudes’ by the famous modernist photographer Man Ray will be inaugurated

The exhibition presents 38 prints of his most characteristic nude photographs, some of which are less known and publicized. They are representational nudes that with Man Ray’s extraordinary technique transcend the human flesh and enter a dream dimension, carrying the spectator into the hyperreal universe of their creator. Known female models such as Kiki de Montparnasse, Ady, Natasha, the known artist Meret Oppenheim, the photographer Berenice Abbott, but also male models such as Jean Charles Worth and drag queens such as Barbette signify, through the avant-garde art of Man Ray, the empowering femininity of the new modern era, in the first decades of the 20th century.

Man Ray’s father, Melach Radnitzky, was born in Kiev in 1866 and emigrated to USA in 1886, in order to escape the first wave of antisemitic pogrom that started in 1881 at the city Elisavetgrad (Kropyvnytskyi) of Central Ukraine, a part then of the Russian Empire. His mother Manya Louria was of Jewish-Belarussian descent. His real name was Emmanuel Rudzitsky. Born in Philadelphia, he settled at a young age in New York where he studied painting and quickly expressed his interest in photography. Along with Marcel Duchamp he pursued to organize a dada movement in New York. In 1921 he moved to Paris where he became part of the surrealist circles. He invented techniques that evolve art and photography as a visual art such as the “Rayographs”, photograms created in the dark room without camera and lens. Man Ray died in Paris at 1976. His nude photographs are among his most characteristic series and run the whole spectrum of his art.