Three Christs, Sleeping Mime, and the Last Supper
Pagan Paradise

Charles Ray and the Hill Collection

“It’s not a museum; it’s an art foundation,” says Hill, who, as a board member of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and former chair of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, knows the difference. “A museum implies permanence and a higher scholarly framework. This is about our taste and our objectives around education. This is personal. It’s about what I like.”

“What especially struck Hill was the correlation—an unconscious influence, perhaps—of Barthélemy Prieur’s 16th-century bronze Lion Devouring a Doe had on Ray’s 2018 sterling-silver sculpture Mountain lion attacking dog. Hill, who purchased the Prieur work from the collection of Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza, realized that Ray could be fit for the task of curating a show placing works like these side-by-side. Both pieces will feature in the forthcoming exhibition.”

“After making layered, silk-screened floral patterns in the 1990s, Mr. Wool became more gestural; three extraordinary paintings here from the 2000s, with cloudy spray-gun loop-de-loops and merciless erasures, exhibit a simultaneous love and doubt of abstraction that recalls the best of Albert Oehlen. His enthrallingly difficult later silk-screens cannibalize his own archive, discordantly remixing earlier works and treating paint as both material and information.”