Ugo Rondinone
Rondinone is widely known for his temporary, large-scale land art sculpture, Seven Magic Mountains (2016–2021), with its seven fluorescently-painted totems of large, car-size stones stacked 32 feet (9.8 m) high.
Conditions were unsanitary and unsafe, and it was ultimately the outcry that followed Carlo Levi’s 1945 account of his time there, “Christ Stopped at Eboli,” that led the government to relocate Sassi di Matera’s residents, including Benito Rondinone’s family, to nearby low-income housing.
[10] In 2013 he exhibited an installation called Human Nature at Rockefeller Center, a group of nine monumental figures made of rough-hewn slabs of bluestone from a quarry in Northern Pennsylvania, resembling rudimentary rock totems.
The artist commonly starts his trajectory, however, with landscapes drawn in India ink, in a style reminiscent of both seventeenth-century Dutch art and German Romanticism.
“In the midst of the AIDS crisis,” Rondinone recalls, “I turned away from my grief and found a spiritual guard rail in nature, a place for comfort, regeneration and inspiration.
An extension of the gallery entrance, this wall isolated the exhibition system from the space’s facade and dissociated it from its “daily life,” creating a sort of corridor whose confined quality—conducive to spiritual and introspective contemplation—offered a powerful contrast with the openness to the world and nature suggested by the landscapes.
After his first exhibition at the Galerie Walcheturm in Zurich in 1991, in which he perpetuated the “narrative” of the Kunstmuseum Luzern and emphasized the “duality” formed by landscapes open to the world and a space cut off from it, in 1992, Rondinone unveiled a family of works that was resolutely other—his sun paintings.
Related in their own way to spiritual withdrawal and “mindless activity,” these paintings are considered by the artist as a continuation of the landscapes, except, of course, for the fact that they replace the “figurative” drawings in black and white with a chromatic spectrum that is as iridescent and hypnotic as it is “abstract.” Distant.
A sculptural self-portrait of the artist placed in a sterile environment—but in contrast to previous presentations in the gallery, a space no longer closed off from the urban landscape outside it—the work, inspired by the fictional character Jean Des Esseintes in Joris-Karl Huysmans' 1884 novel À rebours, offers up yet another variation on the ideas of turning inward on oneself and spiritual withdrawal.
Clowns appeared in his work at the beginning of the decade and were then portrayed in several different mediums and modes of presentation: in drawings or a mural; in photographs, videos or performances; and in installations or sculptures, once again demonstrating the artist's impressive latitude.
Examples include two groups of hyperrealistic sculptures conceived between 2000 and 2002 (if there were anywhere but desert) and between 2014 and 2016 (vocabulary of solitude), the latter a spectacular work consisting of forty-five “passive” clowns scattered throughout the exhibition space.
According to Ludovico Pratesi, Rondinone “situates his art outside of the real time, projecting it onto an atemporal dimension where each spectator can create his or her own time and space within an experiential work, a Gesamtkunstwerk through which everyone can reflect on life and the condition of the human being, or, as the artist suggests, as ‘an escape from the outside world toward the inner one.’” From there, one finds through the theme of temporality, which is omnipresent in his work, another iteration of the idea of withdrawal or retreat, and of the idea of a cycle.
In the 1990s, Rondinone also consolidated his exploration of two motifs already present or previously addressed in his work: the tree and the window, which were brought together in an exhibition in 1997 at the Galleria Bonomo in Rome.
Returning to certain motifs, shifting their perspectives and opening them up to new elaborations are all part of the artist's modus operandi, a way for him to signify that a family of works is never static—that it can give rise to survivals or mutations, to transfigurations and metamorphoses, to new dialogues that have not yet been imagined.
The different layers of paint applied to “objects” or “environments” conceived by the artist come to mind, as do the themes of disguise or travesty and of masks that frequently inform his work.
The proliferation (of families) of works has continued into the twenty-first century in a growing number of exhibitions or installations, making it possible for the artist to foster a narrative that is increasingly diversified.
Whether in galleries or art institutions, in urban spaces or natural settings, these presentations never cease to expand the “domino effect” established at the beginning of his career.
It should also be noted that in parallel to his art, Rondinone has added yet another achievement to his list of accomplishments by officiating as a curator, in exhibitions in which he would also promote a vision inspired by the theme of antagonism.
In keeping with the previous development of his ideas, the artist also expanded during this period on certain “themes” or “motifs,” subjecting them to variations and transformations, displacements and phenomena of survival, while at the same time also inventing new ones, always in the interest of generating dialogues between families of works.
Many of these are affiliated with a postminimalist aesthetic and are articulated in sculptures, at times associated with work on sound and language, and renegotiate geometric forms that can be closed or open depending on the context.
In the more greyish, earthy and mineral tones: the clouds from 2008 and their diary; the nudes from 2010-2011, the birds from 2011; the horses from 2013-2014; the fish from 2016, and a large family of “archaic” and “atemporal” sculptures in bluestone created from 2013 on.
The mountains constitute colorful, abstract alternatives to the figurative bluestone sculptures, while the nuns + monks (2020), which encapsulate the spiritual questions Rondinone raises in his work, perfectly combine many of the “contradictory” vectors that characterize it.
Made in painted bronze, these sculptures were first conceived in the form of limestone models, allowing the artist to combine within the same proposition an origin from the mineral world and a chromatic treatment that is extremely artificial.
Laura Hoptman, a curator at the Museum of Modern Art and a friend of both Rondinone and Giorno, said about the exhibition: "As much as the show exhibits the remarkable dedication that Ugo has to John’s extraordinary career, John’s decision to give Ugo his lifetime of work — his oeuvre entire — to make an installation is an act of love that I believe has no precedent, at least in recent art history,” Ms. Hoptman wrote in an email.
This includes a large pink phallus from Sarah Lucas’ Penetralia series (2008), which is on display in the living room in Rondinone’s renovated Harlem church.
Also in 1989, the same year of Rondinone's emergence into the art scene, Presenhuber accepted the directorship of the nonprofit Galerie Walcheturm in Zurich, provided she could also run her own program in a project space.
In accordance with Italian law, these casts are done on-site in Rondinone's parents' hometown of Matera with rubber, and only later in the studio they are transformed through wax and then take their final aluminum form.
New York City and Des Moines represent starkly different urban environments, and in each, air gets into everything even nothing asks questions about “time, displacement, and the relationship between natural and artificial environment.”[30] Rondinone’s neon sculpture Hell, Yes!
[31] Rondinone limited himself to creating one bird each day: “This imposition of a time constraint helped the artist to achieve a naive and childlike quality in the modeling of the bird.”[31] The works in nuns + monks are a series from 2019 and 2020 of two-tone painted bronze sculptures which are made from casts of limestones.
The piece was previously owned by patron, collector, and museum trustee David Teiger, who installed the nearly seventeen-feet tall and nineteen-feet wide cast aluminum and white enamel sculpture on the front lawn of his home in New Jersey.
