13 October – 21 November 2009
Nude
For his latest solo show at Sadie Coles HQ, Ugo Rondinone is displaying new sculptures from his ongoing still.life series. Tree trunks, walnuts, potatoes and other everyday objects and materials have been cast in lead filled bronze, echoing the lowly or perishable items traditionally depicted in still life paintings. Rondinone’s subjects also glance back to the simple materials of arte povera in the 1960s and after. Yet Rondinone inflects that movement’s methodology of appropriation, supplanting the concept of the readymade with a process of artful and painstaking fabrication.
As the show’s title implies, Rondinone’s subjects have been stripped down and re-contextualized both through their transposition into the gallery space and their transmutation into the incongruous bronze and lead medium.The pine tree sculptures traverse the gallery floor and wall like an architectural framework, acquiring a monumental quality even in their lopped, ‘denuded’ state. The tree is a recurring motif in Rondinone’s work and evidences a quixotic pastoral strain that characterise many of his sculptures and drawings.
Rondinone’s minimalist arrangements of bronze potatoes or polished stones draw upon Modernist sculpture in the way they accentuate the sculptural properties of quotidian forms and throwaway items. The textured surface of the cast cardboard likewise takes on a painterly or malerische dimension. Yet the bald ‘ordinariness’ of Rondinone’s subjects endures owing to the mastery of their trompe l’oeuil.
In this respect, Nude reflects the long tradition of still life – from the Dutch masters to Cezanne – of apparent naturalism underpinned by compositional artifice. Moreover, the sculptures possess the same sense of time suspended and death held at bay, almost like an intake of breath that remains perpetually and impossibly withheld. As the title still.life suggests, the sculptures represent a self-contained, frozen moment – weighted and isolated with lead. The bronzes’ lead cores reinforce the notion of heaviness pulling them towards the ground. Time is thickened and slowed into space. The lead filled bronze casts constitute a stay against the passage of time, and revert to the ideas of impact, isolation and passivity that run through Rondinone’s art. Yet paradoxically, in so doing, they mount a melancholy reflection on their subjects’ inexorable transience.
26 Jan – 11 March 2006
my endless numbered days
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.
11 September - 14 October 2002
cigarettesandwich
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.