Museum SAN, Wonju
06 April - 01 December 2024
“Like a diarist, I record the living universe. this season, this day, this hour, this sound in the grass, this crashing wave, this sunset, this end of the day, this silence.”
– Ugo Rondinone
Museum SAN is pleased to present BURN TO SHINE, a solo exhibition of works by Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone. With over forty works of sculpture, painting, installation, and film featured in the museum’s three main galleries, as well as the Nam June Paik Hall and the outdoor stone garden, BURN TO SHINE offers the most comprehensive presentation of the artist’s oeuvre in Korea to date. In contrast to the broad spectrum of medium and visual language that individual works employ, however, the exhibition, as a whole, gravitates toward themes that remain at the core of Rondinone’s artistic practice spanning over three decades – the cycle of life, and relationship to nature that fundamentally define our human condition and experience. According to the artist, BURN TO SHINE is a desire for transformation: “The initial inspiration came from a poem by John Giorno titled You Got to Burn to Shine: a Buddhist proverb about the coexistence of life and death, reminiscent of the much older Greek myth of the phoenix, the immortal bird that regenerates cyclically or is reborn in a different way. Associated with the sun, the phoenix receives new life by resurrecting from the ashes of its predecessor.”