my endless numbered days
26 Jan – 11 March 2006
During walks around Vienna last summer, Ugo Rondinone made a number of drawings. In these sketches he picked out windows and architectural details from the city’s buildings. For my endless numbered days, these have been transferred, as pencil on white canvas into a series of beautifully delicate, iconic paintings. On the reverse of each canvas are images cut from The New York Times on the date each painting was made. The blunt reality of these images creates a jolt after the delicate fairytale like musings of a flâneur in the city.
The casual installation of these airy, wistful paintings together with a group of simple sculptures, based on the choreographing of different units, reflects the idea of hours idled away. The works evoke the pleasure of time that doesn’t necessarily have to be filled - the ideal conditions for having ideas and making art. The informality behind the grouping takes its inspiration from a type of photograph showing great modern collections in the 1950s, such as Peggy Guggenheim’s installations in her home or gallery. With this allusion, Rondinone gives voice to a romantic nostalgia for this reverence for leisure and for art created as part of that process.
Ugo Rondinone lives and works in New York and Zurich. This, his third show at Sadie Coles HQ coincides with his first major museum show in the UK, at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London. An extensive catalogue raisonné of his work is to be published at the same time.
cigarettesandwich
11 Sept to 14 Oct 2002
cigarettesandwich at Sadie Coles HQ presents a new series of landscapes by Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone, his second show for the gallery. Controlling every aspect of the tone of the space, with the windows covered up and the walls draped in Hessian, the gallery is transformed into a cocoon. Within this stage setting we are engulfed by four huge Arcadian landscapes. The exquisite delicacy and detail of the black ink on paper drawings is off-set by their scale. The density of the images render the negative landscapes threateningly impenetrable, but like the lost children of fairy tales, curiosity draws us in.
Like all of Rondinone’s work, the landscapes reflect the artist’s interest in disrupting boundaries, be they physical, mental, biological or social, thereby questioning the tenuous and subjective nature of stability. This disquieting installation, like Rondinone’s target paintings, gender-transformation photo-pieces, or the sentimental slogans of the neon text works, reasserts his ability to upset our equilibrium, making us question our powers of perception and reconsider our need for neat compartmentalisation.
Ugo Rondinone lives and works in New York and Zurich. Recent exhibitions include No How On at Kunsthalle Wien (2002), Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye at Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome (2001), and Guided by Voices at Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig, Germany (1999) and Kunsthaus Glarus, Switzerland.