Charles Ross

Charles Ross (b. 1937, Philadelphia, PA) has long explored the substance of light, time, and planetary motion-qualities related to the cosmos and the long journey and multiplicities of light. As an undergraduate student studying mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, Ross developed an interest in spatial geometry, movement, and the inanimate object. In his senior year at Berkeley, Ross took a sculpture course to fulfill a liberal arts requirement and discovered great possibility, and a latent interest in making sculpture, in applying the abstract and esoteric thinking he learned in math. In addition to such bodies of work as Ross’ “explosion drawings,” prism sculptures, and “solar burns,” Ross has been at work on Star Axis, a monumental architectonic earth/star sculpture located in remote New Mexico, since its conception in 1971 and groundbreaking in 1976.

Charles Ross earned a B.A. in Mathematics from University of California, Berkeley in 1960, and an M.F.A. in Sculpture from University of California, Berkeley in 1962. Ross is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow, recipient of a 1999 Andy Warhol Foundation Grant, and awardee of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Eugene V. and Clare Thaw Charitable Trust, Someland Foundation, and McCune Charitable Foundation, to name a few. His works reside in the permanent collections of numerous institutions internationally including National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC), Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris, FR), Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, MN), Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY), Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (Berkeley, CA), Des Moines Art Center (Des Moines, IA), Indianapolis Museum of Art (Indianapolis, IN), Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University (Ithaca, NY), Nelson Atkins Museum of Art (Kansas City, MO), New Mexico Museum of Art (Santa Fe, NM), The Penn Art Collection at University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, PA).

Charles Ross is represented by Franklin Parrasch Gallery and parrasch heijnen, Los Angeles.