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Lot Essay
Chess became a continual ritual for Man Ray since his encounter with his great friend and enthusiastic chess player Marcel Duchamp in New York. The pair would often play throughout the night, believing that games allowed one to explore the repressed desires of the unconscious.
Man Ray designed his first chess set in 1920, with found objects from his studio. The various series which followed were predominantly made with simple geometric shapes: the king was a pyramid, the queen a cone, the rook a cube, the pawn a sphere and the knight an old violin head.
He subsequently improved the subject of the chess set from 1945, issuing a limited number of signed sets in wood, and in aluminium. Variations in the form included replacing the knight, which was formerly an old violin head, with a cylinder with a sphere on top, representing the profile of the arched horse’s neck.
The chess board was perceived by Man Ray as a surrealist object as the artist believed that ‘games give form to a liberation, allowing one to give free rein to their imagination and carelessly mingle between reality and fantasy.’ (quoted in A. Schwarz, Man Ray The Rigour of Imagination, London 1977, p. 201).
Man Ray designed his first chess set in 1920, with found objects from his studio. The various series which followed were predominantly made with simple geometric shapes: the king was a pyramid, the queen a cone, the rook a cube, the pawn a sphere and the knight an old violin head.
He subsequently improved the subject of the chess set from 1945, issuing a limited number of signed sets in wood, and in aluminium. Variations in the form included replacing the knight, which was formerly an old violin head, with a cylinder with a sphere on top, representing the profile of the arched horse’s neck.
The chess board was perceived by Man Ray as a surrealist object as the artist believed that ‘games give form to a liberation, allowing one to give free rein to their imagination and carelessly mingle between reality and fantasy.’ (quoted in A. Schwarz, Man Ray The Rigour of Imagination, London 1977, p. 201).