Gladstone
Gallery is pleased to present the sun at 4pm, an exhibition that continues Ugo
Rondinone’s decades-long examination of the link between the natural world and
the human condition. Extending the artist’s mining of the German Romantic
movement, and particularly Caspar David Friedrich, as a primary source of
reference, the four distinct bodies of work on view – mountain, sun, waterfall,
and cloud – present a setting wherein the commonplace of the everyday gives way
to the sublimity of environmental phenomena.
In
formations that immediately call to mind rock spire outcroppings, or “hoodoo,”
endemic to the Badlands of North America, Rondinone’s mountain sculptures
consist of rocks vertically stacked on concrete plinths of varying sizes.
Austere in their reference to Minimalist composition and titling, the artist
mitigates severity in both the Day-Glo coloring of the boulders, as well as the
deferential nod to the tradition of stone stacking, a practice seen from
prehistoric dolmens to contemporary cairns. In these gestures, Rondinone
extends the specificity of art history to a universality gleaned from cult
objects that exist worldwide. It is this ability to meld the romanticism of the
individual into the transcendence of the metaphysical that ties together all
works in the exhibition.
Forever
preserved in a state of precariousness, the mountain sculptures also manifest a
suspension of time. This notion of temporality carries over to Rondinone’s new
series of sculptures, sun. Composed of branches cast in aluminum and then
gilded, the world’s oldest gauge of time is rendered static. As the
exhibition’s poetic title indicates, this interior presentation of an exterior
natural occurrence calls into question not only our conception of time’s
passage, but also the ways in which society turns nature into artificial
intervals. In the same breath, by fashioning abstracted solar forms from the
branches of real-life trees, Rondinone venerates the quotidian world as nothing
short of extraordinary.
Modeled by
hand in clay and cast in aluminum, the spiraling waterfall works seem to
simultaneously collapse downwards and expand upwards, creating a visual tension
between gravity and ethereality. The cloud canvases capture a similar paradox,
in which the painted abstract surface points to an infinite celestial world
beyond the gallery’s walls, but the cartoon-like borders root the works in an
unambiguous literalism. By rendering such incongruity through beautiful visual
means, Rondinone sets the stage for an existential reflection on artificial
versus natural, banal versus sublime.
Ugo
Rondinone was born in 1964 in Brunnen, Switzerland and currently lives and
works in New York. Rondinone has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at
institutions including: MACRO and Mercati di Traiano, Rome; The Institute of
Contemporary Art, Boston; Carré d’Art, Nîmes, France; Museum Boijmans van
Beuningen, Rotterdam; Museum Anahuacalli, Mexico City; Rockbund Art Museum,
Shanghai; M Museum, Leuven, Belgium; Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens;
Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, Vienna; and Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Deurle,
Belgium. This past May, Rondinone’s large-scale public work seven magic
mountains opened outside Las Vegas, co-produced by the Art Production Fund and
Nevada Museum of Art, and in the coming year, solo exhibitions of the artist
will be held at Place Vendome, Paris; Bass Museum of Art, Miami; Contemporary
Arts Center, Cincinnati; and Berkeley Art Museum in California.
Venue name:
Gladstone Gallery
Venue
Address: 530 W 21st St., New York 10011
Cross
street: between Tenth and Eleventh Aves
Opening
hours: Tue–Sat 10am–6pm
Transport:
Subway: C, E to 23rd St
website: www.gladstonegallery.com
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