Ugo Rondinone (born November 30, 1964) is a Swiss-born contemporary artist.
Rondinone is 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 high.
Early life and education Ugo Rondinone was born in 1964 to Italian parents, Benito and Eufemia Rondinone, in the resort town of Brunnen, Switzerland.
His father, Benito, was born in Matera, Italy, an ancient city built into limestone cliffs and the site of Mel Gibson's 2004 biblical drama film The Passion of the Christ (2004) and Pier Paolo Pasolini's 1964 biblical drama film The Gospel According to St. Matthew.
Benito was a mason who built stone walls by hand. Benito grew up in Sassi di Matera, a series of Paleolithic-era cave dwellings, which was in 1993 declared a Unesco World Heritage Site but was, during Benito's childhood, still an active community. Conditions were unsanitary and unsafe, and it was ultimately the outcry that followed Carlo Levi's 1945 memoir 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.
His father's upbringing has contributed greatly to Rondinone's work, influencing his extensive body of work in stone as well as his interest in southern Italy's olive trees. In a 2013 article for The New York Times, David Colman wrote about the piece of limestone that Rondinone wears around his neck on a leather strap, which had been passed down in his family for many years: "A stone, un sasso, drilled with a hole, it was worn around the neck as a kind of proto-ID. Different stones were worn, 24-7, by different workers in the Sassi, depending on which landowner they were bound to. Benito had never worn it, having left the area while still young, but his father, Frederico, had worn it and given it to his son, just as Frederico's father had worn it and given it to him, and his father before him."
Rondinone's brother Luca, seven years his junior, lives in Brunnen. In Brunnen, Rondinone grew up trilingual, speaking French, Italian, and German.
Rondinone moved to Zurich in 1983 to become the assistant to Hermann Nitsch and studied at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, from 1986 to 1990, where he studied with the artist Bruno Gironcoli. Rondinone also studied under Ernst Caramelle. In 1985, while in school, Rondinone met fellow student Eva Presenhuber, who would become his art dealer in Zurich and his nominal wife.
In 1997, Rondinone was accepted into MoMA PS1's International Studio Program and moved to New York City, where he continues to live and work. In New York, he began a relationship with the artist and poet John Giorno, after the two met at a poetry reading at New York City's St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery in which Giorno was participating. Rondinone and Giorno collaborated on a 1999 exhibition, which developed into a romantic relationship which would last until Giorno's death in 2019.
Career Rondinone emerged as an artist in the 1990s.Ugo Rondinone Biography , New Media Encyclopedia, retrieved 04.04.2015 His paintings are noted for their brightly colored, concentric rings of target-shapes;"Ugo Rondinone 'Post-History Painting'". Pomeranz Collection. and strictly black-and-white landscapes of gnarled trees."Ugo Rondinone, 'Temporary Contemporary'". Bass Museum of Art.
Since 1997, Rondinone has included the practice of making signs in his varied oeuvre; he takes phrases from pop songs and everyday exclamations and makes them into rainbow-hued, neon-lit sculptures, including Hell, Yes (2001).Ugo Rondinone: Hell, Yes!, December 7, 2007 – November 12, 2010 New Museum. Another series of installations, Clockwork for Oracles (2008–2010) consists of mirrored works that are hung salon-style over a wall of pages from the local paper sourced at the time of installation.Gabriella Angeleti (July 29, 2016), Bass museum to fill expanded space with shows by Ugo Rondinone, Mika Rottenberg and Pascale Marthine Tayou The Art Newspaper.
Rondinone later created a series that includes bronze-cast birds (primitive, 2011), horses (primal, 2013) and fish (primordial, 2018).Ugo Rondinone: primordial, April 20 – May 28, 2016 Gladstone Gallery.
Rondinone’s totem-like figures have been installed all over the world, from the Jardin des Tuileries in Paris (2009) to the Yokohama Triennale (2011).Ugo Rondinone: Nude, May 4 - October 15, 2012 Goulandris Museum of Cycladic Art. In 2013, he exhibited an installation called Human Nature at Rockefeller Center in New York City, a group of nine monumental figures made of rough-hewn slabs of bluestone from a quarry in Northern Pennsylvania, resembling rudimentary rock totems.Ugo Rondinone: Human Nature, April 23 - July 7, 2013 Public Art Fund. Similarly, Soul (2013) is a group of thirty-seven figures from bluestone found in upstate New York, ranging from just under three feet to nearly seven feet tall.Roberta Smith (June 27, 2013), [Ugo Rondinone: ‘Soul’] New York Times. Another sculptural installation, Vocabulary of Solitude (2016), involves forty-five sculptures of clowns named after and positioned doing everyday tasks such as "wake, sit, walk and shower".
Early works If one refers to the official index of Rondinone's works, his corpus originates with a series of sculptures of flowers in plaster and Vaseline, dated 1988. The artist commonly starts his trajectory, however, with landscapes drawn in India ink, in a style reminiscent of both 17th-century Dutch art and German Romanticism.
Based on preparatory drawings he made during country walks outside of Vienna, these nostalgic landscapes introduced a number of elements that can also be found in his later works: a protocol leading him to create artworks based on handmade "studies" that, via several "transports" or transfers potentially incorporating steps delegated to independent contractors, result in another image; an attraction to variations on a single theme; the use of "cycles" and "systems", in particular those conveyed by nomenclature in the titles he attributes to his works; and last, the creation of work pertaining to his autobiography.
Those early landscapes were, in fact, made in response to loss – the artist's partner, Manfred Kirchner, having died of AIDS in 1988. "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. In nature, you enter a space where the sacred and the profane, the mystical and the secular vibrate against one another."
The first landscape was painted on February 23, 1989. Rondinone would show three others, produced in March, June and October, respectively, in an exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Luzern in Switzerland that same year, in which his approach to presentation might be considered the matrix of his exhibitions to come.
An Art of Exhibition One cannot dissociate Rondinone's exhibitions from his works, which as a result evolve in forms of presentation that are ceaselessly reinvented by the artist. As with the way in which his works are subject to variations, he modifies the way their "content" and "container" are shown from one exhibition to the next. These modifications can be infinitesimal or can, on the contrary, involve profound changes. They can open up new perspectives or displace them. And they can involve the elaboration of a "scenario" so that for each presentation, the work or works can be seen as if never shown before. Exhibitions are also a way for the artist to play on vectors that are complementary, if not contradictory; a work shown by Rondinone in a specific context is often juxtaposed with "opposite" proposals.
This can be seen with his landscapes. In the 1989 exhibition, his India-ink drawings were arranged in a "homogeneous" manner, while a second exhibition, held in the same location a year later and devoted to his 1990 landscapes, presented them next to a temporary wall made of wooden slats painted in white. 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. The first "wall" imagined by Rondinone, it permitted him to invite a new "protagonist" or "figure" into a work for which the exhibition space would be the preferred stage and setting.
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 sort of diurnal counterpart to the nocturnal scenes, reflecting once again the law of contrasts that is so prominent in Rondinone's work.
The 1990s The 1990s were marked by a dizzying proliferation of works, the "domino effect" set up by the artist and fueled by the "exhibition-as-form" that gives his art a rhizomic perspective. One need only look at the different pairings that articulate themselves around the sun paintings to assess the wide range of possibilities. Other "figures" independent of these paintings also emerged.
This is notably the case with heyday, which appears to be nearly identical to the exhibition Cry Me a River, organized once again at the Galerie Walcheturm in Zurich in 1995. 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's 1884 novel À rebours (Against Nature), offers up yet another variation on the ideas of turning inward on oneself and spiritual withdrawal.
Another "figure" entered Rondinone's corpus in the 1990s: the clown. 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. "As a group," Rondinone explains, "the forty-five clowns represent one single person, dividing its twenty-four-hour day into forty-five homebound activities (...) creating a cycle of a twenty-four-hour loop."