Mr. Ray (1975) sets two words in large white sans-serif capitals against a ground of pooled, saturated colour — reds, yellows, blues, and greens bleeding into each other across the field in soft-edged washes that have the quality of a tie-dye or a weather map seen from altitude. MR. above RAY below, the text clean and white, the ground behind it anything but. The contrast between the precision of the lettering and the looseness of the colour is the image's central tension.

The phrase itself is productively unstable. MR. RAY is a form of address — polite, slightly formal, American — but attached to a surname that activates a specific association immediately. Man Ray, the Surrealist and Dadaist whose photograms, rayographs, and objects had made him one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, died in Paris in 1976, one year after this print was made. Whether Ruscha is naming him, alluding to him, or simply finding a two-syllable combination that carries an interesting charge is left open. The influence of Duchamp and the Dada tradition on Ruscha's thinking was well established by the mid-1970s — the idea that concept precedes craft, that selection is a creative act, that a word or an object can become art through attention rather than transformation. MR. RAY, against that colourful, slightly psychedelic ground, sits in that tradition without announcing it.

Produced as an offset lithograph in colours in an edition of one hundred, it is among the most visually immediate of his mid-career text works.

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