Man Ray exploited countless artistic media and techniques in an inventive and playful manner. In his autobiography, appearing in 1963, he wrote: “... the instrument did not matter – one could always reconcile the subject with the means and get a result that would be interesting (...) One should be superior to his limited means, use imagination, be inventive.”

While Man Ray’s photography is omnipresent in every overview on Dadaism and Surrealism, until now only few people in the German-speaking regions have been aware of him as a universal artist. His artistic brinkmanship relates not only to very diverse media, but also the two art capitals of the twentieth century – Paris and New York, where Man Ray alternately lived. Kunstforum’s exhibition will be devoted to “the universal Man Ray” and critically address discourses that mark his oeuvre in general, such as the closeness and distance between male and female physicality and creativity and their enactment in his oeuvre; it will also show Man Ray as “friend to everyone who was anyone”, who associated in the most glamorous circles of society and thus as prototype of the artistic networker and catalyst.

A selection of 150 keyworks from all over the world, including painting, photography, objects, works on paper, collages and assemblages and experimental film, will help to map the outline of an enigmatic and complex artist personality who paved the way for modern and contemporary art, and – in congenial artistic complicity with Marcel Duchamp – laid groundwork for how and what we see as “art” today.