Description

Born in 1964, Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone, based in New York, is one of the most prominent voices in contemporary visual arts. A master of multiple forms and techniques, he works alternately with photography, video, painting, drawing, sculpture, sound, and text. Rondinone is particularly interested in destabilizing the viewer's perception and challenging their certainties by creating surprising sensory environments. By reorganizing content and formal elements through a personal poetic filter, and drawing direct inspiration from the outside world, he envelops the audience in a synesthetic experience.

The artist has developed very precise and repetitive series—sculptures and videos of clowns, acrylic paintings of targets on linen, rubber masks, sculptures of faces in aluminum, oversized wax light bulbs, striped paintings on polyester, sculptures in stone, landscapes in ink, bronze still life objects, video and sound installations—with which he explores themes such as fantasy and desire, extending into literature and poetry, contemporary cinema and the visual arts.

A new three-volume series extensively documents three of Rondinone's most acclaimed series: Landscape Paintings, Horizon Paintings, and Sun Paintings. In the third volume, dedicated to Landscape Paintings (1989–2011), critic and curator Bice Curiger offers a historical and poetic reading of this body of work, while Anne Buschhoff, curator of prints at the Kunsthalle Bremen, provides an iconographic perspective. She concludes: “With his forest scenes, Rondinone has developed a private iconography of landscape—a pictorial reality that plays with the supposedly real and elevates it to the surreal. In doing so, he opens up spaces of imagination in the viewer. But above all, in doing so, he places nature entirely at their disposal, transforming it into something biographical. The forest is a psychological space—the forest is Rondinone.”

Authors
Anne Buschhoff
Bice Curiger
Ugo Rondinone

Technical specifications
Published by: Galerie Eva Presenhuber
Year: 2011
Type: Exhibition catalog
Binding: Hardcover
Dimensions: 31 x 24 cm
Weight: 2.4 kg
Language: English
Pages: 313
ISBN: 978-3-03764-507-9