The complete Landscape Paintings.
The artist has developed very precise and repetitive series—clown sculptures and videos, target acrylic paintings on linen, rubber masks, aluminum face sculptures, oversized wax lightbulbs, striped paintings on polyester, stone sculptures, landscape ink painting, bronze still-life objects, video and sound installations—through which he explores themes of fantasy and desire, branching out in literature and poetry, contemporary cinema, and the visual arts.
A new series of three publications extensively documents three of his most renowned series: the
Horizon Paintings, the
Horizon Paintings, and the
Sun Paintings. In the third volume dedicated to the
Landscapes Paintings (1989–2011), critic and curator Bice Curiger proposes an historical and poetical reading of this body of work, while Kunsthalle Bremen Curator of Prints Anne Buschhoff offers an iconographic perspective on them. She concludes, “With his forest pieces, Rondinone has developed a private iconography of landscape—a pictorial reality, which plays with the purportedly real, and heightens it to the point of the surreal. In doing so, he opens spaces of imagination in the viewer. But above all, in doing so, he places nature entirely at his own disposal, turning it into the biographical. The forest is a psychological space—the forest is Rondinone.”
Ugo Rondinone (*1963, Switzerland) has lived in New York for several years. Using photography, video, painting, drawing, sculpture, sound, and text by turns, Rondinone is a virtuoso of forms and techniques.
Developing surprising sensorial environments, he especially likes destabilizing our perceptions and unsettling our certainties. Rearranging content and formal elements, a personal poetic with elements taken directly from the outside world, he draws us into a synesthetic experience.
See also
Palais #22 – Ugo Rondinone – I Love John Giorno;
Bomb #140;
Album – On/around the work of Urs Fischer, Yves Netzhammer, Ugo Rondinone and Christine Streuli.
