UGO RONDINONE

(B. 1963)

Silver Black White Green Mountain
2016

Footnotes

Provenance
Gladstone Gallery, New York
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 2016

Exhibited
New York, Gladstone Gallery, the sun at 4pm, 2016



Ugo Rondinone's work is timeless, transcendent, and powerful. He evokes our preternatural infatuation with the totem, be it figurative, divine, or mythical. A structure that is as rudimentary as it is authoritative. Throughout his career, the Swiss-born artist has navigated nature, spirituality, and materiality, often capturing such grand ideas in the delicate surfaces and compositions of a single work. He treats art as poetry: his sculptures are wonderfully self-contained, yet they are made up of elements that are individual, primal, and carefully balanced. In the present work, Silver Black White Green Mountain from 2016 – part of Rondinone's signature Mountain series that has been the centrepiece of major public art commissions around the world – the ideas that underpin his practice are expressed with a simplicity, lyricism and grandeur that is deeply compelling.

Rondinone's Mountain series has been definitive of his career at large; instantly recognisable and highly sought-after. Tracing a line between natural phenomena and the human condition, Rondinone's work emerges from materials that are innately primordial and raw. His role as the artist is to colour, shape, and provide balance to the matter he is given. The totems speak to, not only the artist's relationship to his chosen medium, but to humanity's role as caretakers of the rock on which it stands. In the artist's words, he's 'putting faith in stone as material—in its innate beauty and energy, its structural quality, its surface texture, and its ability to collect and condense time. The grotesque biomorphic distortion that characterizes the lifetime of a stone can become a haunting openness when transformed by colour and palpable emotional charge' (the artist in an interview with Mitchell Anderson, 'Organic Accord: Ugo Rondinone', moussemagazine.it, 5 November 2020).

The associations embedded in Rondinone's work go beyond the relationship between the natural, human, and spiritual, however. In the present work, there is a resurgent presence of Minimalism, Brancusi's Endless Column, and Land Art. Donald Judd's stacks and Michael Heizer's Levitated Mass (2012) are art historical threads that Rondinone conjures masterfully – the latest in a lineage of multifaceted artists to engage with a phenomenology that emerges from the simplicity and rationality that is inherent to the order of the world around us. Painted in glistening, unnatural pigments, Silver Black White Green Mountain is a sterling example that captures the spirit of an artist who continues to be a pioneer of his generation and whose work is held in global museum collections including the Tate collection, UK; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and the Dallas Museum of Art, among others. He will further be celebrated at this year's 59th Venice Biennale, with a major solo exhibition at the Scuola Grande di San Giovanni Evangelista, titled burn shine fly, paying homage to Rondinone's late partner and collaborator John Giorno.