Nearly 300 works on view explore the world of Man Ray — master of light and matter, an artist who turned the image into a language suspended between intuition and experimentation.

From his early experimental self-portraits to the intense portraits of fellow artists and intellectuals, Man Ray turned photography into a poetic and performative act. For him, the self-portrait became a play on identity: he appears disguised, ambiguous, and ever-changing. The works on view in this section—including some iconic images in which he stages himself like a theatrical character—reflect his playful and subversive approach to self-representation.

In 1920s Paris, he established himself as a portraitist of the avant-garde: Picasso, Dalí, Miró, Stravinsky, Éluard, Breton. The exhibition presents a selection of vintage photographs, rare period originals that convey the emotional and psychological depth of his portraits. Man Ray’s gaze captures fleeting moments in which his subjects reveal something profound: an intuition, a thought, a dream.

Alongside these faces, his “rayographs”—one of his most remarkable inventions—come to life.

Created without a camera, by placing objects directly onto photosensitive paper, these images still surprise today with their abstract and poetic quality. On view are some of his most iconic rayographs, born in the context of Dada and Surrealism, allowing visitors to explore the core of the artist’s visual experimentation.

The exhibition places self-portraits, portraits, and rayographs in dialogue, highlighting how, for Man Ray, the image was never mere documentation but always transformation—an alchemy of form, light, and vision.

The female figure runs through the entire body of Man Ray’s work as a focal point of visual experimentation and poetic inspiration. His muses are never simply subjects to be portrayed: they are active presences, creators and accomplices. Kiki, Lee, Meret, Nusch, Ady, Juliet: each brings with her a story, a relationship, a new form of representation.

The exhibition presents their faces, bodies, and poses through an extraordinary selection of photographs—many of them vintage—that evoke sensuality, freedom, and modernity. From Kiki, ironic and carnal, to Lee, mysterious and solarized, and Meret Oppenheim, poised between eroticism and creative intelligence, the works compose a fascinating mosaic of diverse femininities. In some images, the subjects appear nude, but never as mere objects: they become composition, light, and movement.

For Man Ray, the nude is an autonomous form of art, never gratuitous. He experimented with bold framing, shadow play, and techniques like solarization and rayography, transforming skin into photographic surface—almost into landscape. The works on display allow the viewer to witness this metamorphosis of the body into image, into symbol, into pure form.

Through portraits and nudes, Man Ray celebrates the female body as a space of freedom, eroticism, and invention. The exhibition gives shape to this intimate and powerful universe, made of emotional complicity and daring formal experimentation.

Between 1923 and 1929, Man Ray created four films that hold a unique place in the history of avant-garde cinema. Born from the same experimental drive that fuels his photography, these works abandon all traditional narrative structure to build a new visual language of lyrical juxtapositions, symbols, and free-flowing imagery.

The exhibition features the full projection of these films: Le Retour à la raison (1923), Emak Bakia (1926), L’Étoile de mer (1928), and Les Mystères du Château du Dé (1929). Each film is a world of its own, and the exhibition setting enhances their visionary quality through stills, documents, and behind-the-scenes photographs.

In Le Retour à la raison, created for a Dadaist night in Paris, nails, tacks, and other everyday objects come alive directly on the film strip through rayography techniques, with flickering lights, rhythmic pulses, and ghostly appearances. In Emak Bakia, shot near Biarritz, cinema becomes a sensory flow: faces, spirals, and reflections unfold without apparent logic. L’Étoile de mer, inspired by a poem by Robert Desnos, portrays love through frosted glass and poetic blurs. In Les Mystères du Château du Dé, filmed at the ultra-modern Villa Noailles, the narrative is guided by chance, echoing the verses of Mallarmé.

These films—presented in the exhibition as true works of art—embody the idea of cinema as a space of absolute freedom, far from any constraints. Man Ray isn’t looking for a story, but for suggestion, visual impact, and emotional resonance. Audiences are invited to immerse themselves in these rarefied, enigmatic, and radical images and to discover a lesser-known but deeply compelling side of Man Ray’s universe.

Man Ray’s creativity knew no bounds. From the 1920s onward, he devoted himself to fashion photography, working with designers such as Paul Poiret and, above all, Elsa Schiaparelli, whose dreamlike vision perfectly echoed his own. The images on view, originally published in magazines like Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, show how fashion became a field for aesthetic experimentation. These are not simple catalog images, but sophisticated portraits, compositions, and visual inventions.

Alongside fashion, the exhibition explores Man Ray’s multiples—works derived from his most iconic creations and reimagined as objects, lithographs, and engravings. Sculptures, ready-mades, and visual puns question the very idea of uniqueness in art, revealing his taste for irony, ambiguity, and formal intelligence.

Finally, chess: a passion he shared with Marcel Duchamp, but interpreted through a distinct aesthetic lens. The exhibition presents three sets of chess pieces designed by Man Ray from the 1920s onward: essential shapes, pure volumes, and refined materials (wood, bronze, ivory, aluminum). These pieces were conceived less for play and more to dazzle the eye, transforming the chessboard into a work of sculpture.

Photographs, objects, and period documents reveal an artist who saw art as a way of life, and life as a constant source of inspiration. The exhibition invites visitors to discover how Man Ray reimagined every field he touched—from fashion to play to the everyday object.