Willem Dafoe, "les yeux fermés" (2013) Photography by Ann Ray

Ann Ray is a French multidisciplinary artist who has been writing, filming, photographing, drawing and painting since the age of 9. She produced her first photographic prints at the age of 11, and edited family films by hand (with an editor and cutter) at the same time.

Since 1995, she has devoted herself primarily to the image, via photography and film. She lived successively in Tokyo (2 years), then London (4 years), then Paris. She also goes to New York a lot, and travels regularly, in an insatiable curiosity.

She collaborates with many artists (actors, musicians, dancers, choreographers, creators...) and concentrates in parallel on personal projects, long-term projects, to which she can return constantly: her sources of inspiration and expression, always resolutely human-oriented. His portraits of artists with eyes closed, made since 2004, thus constitute a remarkable photographic corpus, like his "absent conversations" initiated in 2020, contemplative and dreamlike images.

Long stories are part of her career: Alexander McQueen, from 1997 to 2010 (suicide of the creator), for whom she made more than 30,000 silver photographs, and the Paris Opera, since 2004.

The fragile, the almost, the unspoken are essential in his work. Reading on several levels, games of transparencies, interstitial moments: all of Ann Ray's art lies in this ability to grasp the elusive, to immortalize the fleeting and beings, to touch with force and delicacy to the depths of the soul. , at most true.

She is also distinguished by the radical Art Direction of her projects (films, books, staging, exhibitions.) She continues to write, paint and draw.

In 2019, Ray finally seizes his white canvases and undertakes to materialize paintings that have remained in the sketch state. She voluntarily isolates herself in the fall of 2019 (!) - and her compositions on canvas take shape, first mixing words, images, and various materials; then very quickly abstraction imposes itself, pulverizing all limits: she uses collages, oil painting, ink, to create works as intense as they are poetic. She wants each painting to contain the possibility of elevation.

A prolific creator, she works in distinct series in order to remain faithful to the intention. 18 months were thus necessary to create her latest series, "wave clouds", which she will exhibit in 2024.

From now on Ray traces two paths: that of the image, always, with a claimed passion for silver photography and film ("non-manipulated"), and that of abstract compositions.

His photographs and compositions are exhibited in galleries and appear in prestigious institutional and private collections. She exhibited at the Rencontres d'Arles in 2018 and 2023, and published 8 books since 2008.

Ann Ray lives and works between Paris and Brittany, her native land.

• Nationality: FRANCE
• Date of birth : unknown date
• Artistic domains: Works by professional artists,
• Groups: Professional Artist Contemporary French Artists