Licence to dream

Ann Ray was born the 21st of June in Brest, France. She lives and works in Paris, after living in Tokyo & London.
Her photographs have been exhibited worldwide since 2000. She collaborated to "3ème scène", the digital platform of Paris Opera, with a short movie about the composer Nico Muhly, in 2015. "Les inachevés", published in 2018 by Art Cinema, is her 5th book. She collaborates for 17 years with the Opéra de Paris and for 13 years with the Metropolitan Opera in NY.
Art collections : Victoria & Albert Museum, Fondation Carmignac, Collection Florence & Damien Bachelot, Collection Yvon Lambert, Collection Maya Hoffman.
Ray had a major exhibition at the prestigious "Rencontres d'Arles", "Les Inachevés - Lee McQueen", in 2018, curated by Sam Stourdzé, Director of the Festival. With 169 photographs displayed in a 500 sqm wide space, Ray proposed an honest and intimate photographic portrait of Lee Alexander McQueen as a sensitive visionnaire poet - and a spiritual approach of his oeuvre. To present this body of work, Ann Ray immersed herself in her archive of 35000 analogue photographs taken from 1997 to 2010, until her friend's death. She was delighted to transmit her experience through images, and thus to make justice to her beloved friend Lee Alexander McQueen. The exhibition was then selected to travel to China at Jimei x Arles Festival in November 2018.
In 2019, the exhibition “Blind Faith” at Ca Pesaro Museum in Venice revealed around 55 photographic portraits (chosen amongst another major body of work : more than 200 portraits- photography & film- performed over 15 years). It was one of Ray’s precious personal projects, exploring the inner invisible truth and ability to dream of all kinds of great artists, resulting in a series of very of sensitive, unique portraits, with eyes closed.
In April 2019 Ray exhibited some iconic McQueen photographs at Galerie de la Beraudière in Brussels in the exhibition “Gravitas”.She also gave her first master-class at Venezia-Photo in 2019 and revisited her story with McQueen in a new exhibition, “Rendez-Vous” at Barrett Barrera Projects in Saint-Louis, USA. In the same year, she participated in an encounter with photography & art lovers, orchestrated by Culture Secrets, in her atelier in Paris.
Ray used this years confinement in Paris to keep working in her atelier on her first series of collages - initiated in 2019. A few collages will be exhibited as a worldwide premiere, along with various photographic works, at the Gallery Sabine Knust in 2020. This new exhibition, “Licence to dream”, curated by Matthias Kunz, will start on October 15th 2020 in Munich. Reaching out to a namesake, the poet Ann Hamilton, we find perhaps a suggestion, a step ladder for a perspective on Ann’s work: “...humans are flexible in being, in bearing; we shift deameaonors in relation to others, an Other. As we change, we animate the historical pulse. Fashion pretends to reflect these shifts, but often is mere preening mask. Art is better shape-shifter, both avatar and response to what informs.”
Ray will publish a book about choreographers & dancers in 2021, being followed by an exhibition of photographs & films about dance in 2022. She has spent a hugely significant amount of time with dancers worldwide since 2003, devoting entire artistic projects to some of them (“24 hours in man’s life”, “Insensé”).