UGO RONDINONE
September 8 – 21 2023
The right question is not “Who are you?”
It is “Who are you not?”
The mirror has not been with us for long. It was only five or six thousand years ago that some creative and industrious soul polished up a flat piece of bronze and voilà—you, only golden.
So it’s interesting, that the mask has been part of the human selfscape for at least 40,000 years—and, given that most would have been made out of degradable materials like leather, twine and feathers, probably 40,000 years longer.
Perhaps they knew what we do not—your face is a prison, a mask is a key. This basic truth lies at the rock bottom of Ugo Rondinone’s new show of eight stone masks, weighing in between three and 14 kilograms. Elemental and prehistoric in design, they are all different, spaped vaguely like hexagons, ovals, hearts, shields or just a good old-fashioned rocky blob, but they are all visual cousins to the legendary chipped-stone hand axe, the first known human tool. Though mostly the size of a human face, Rondinone’s masks are stonily symbolic, with naught but a pair of blank round eyeholes (albeit with teeny crow’s feet) to suggest a face, and wildly unwearable unless you are very strong and very drunk.
Their blank expression is itself a key, opening the interpretation of the object to free-ranging speculation. This is a quality present in much of Rondinone’s work—not unfinished, yet still open to interpretation. Nowhere is this more true than in his monumental towers or boulders cairns, which balance precariously between contemporary spectacle and primeval totemism.
The masks balance on a knife-edge, too—between self and other, gravity and levity, profundity and play, the mercurial and the leaden, horror and honor, the ordinary and the sublime. “I always like to play with two extremes, to walk tightropes between two qualities,” says Rondinone, showing a visitor around his vast studio in an old Harlem church.
The masks’ qualities can also connect to the myriad roles that masks can play and have played over the millennia, from ritual use, dramatic feature, costume party requisite or, most recently, personal protective gear.
But seen lined up along the wall as a collection, the masks become a seductive multiplicity of faces across time and space. Stone ciphers. Stoic guards and goalies. Saturnian pachyderms. Ecstatic hierophants. Mutant lichens. Chary warriors. Quizzical aliens. Retired models.
They are everything and nothing. Expansively plastic in interpretation yet comfortingly concrete in hand. Why pore over your face in a mirror for truth when it’s already so weighed down with everything that you and the world project onto it? Identity is immobility; the mask is manumission.
– David Colman
Ugo Rondinone was born in 1964 in Brunnen, Switzerland.
Rondinone’s recent solo and group exhibitions include "a yellow a brown and a blue candle" at The National Exemplar Gallery in Iowa City, Iowa (2021); "nuns + monks" at Gladstone Gallery in New York, New York (2021); "a sky. a sea. distant mountains. horses. spring" at Sadie Coles HQ in London, United Kingdom (2021); "feeling the void and the rhone" at Kunsthalle Marcel Duchamp in Cully, Switzerland (2021); "a wall. a door. a tree. a lightbulb. winter." at SKMU Sørlandets Kunstmuseum in Kristiansand, Norway (2021); "Ugo Rondinone and Pat Steir" at Galerie Eva Presenhuber in Zurich, Switzerland (2021); "Crocodile Cradle" at PEER Gallery in London, United Kingdom (2021); "Gold & Magic" at ARKEN Museum for Moderne Kuns in Ishøj, Denmark (2021); “Between the Earth and Sky" at Kasmin Gallery in New York, New York (2021); "Horizons" at Lévy Gorvy in Paris, France (2021); "Eternal Seasons” at Lévy Gorvy in Hong Kong, China (2021); "the monk" at Sant’ Andrea de Scaphis in Rome, Italy (2020); "nuns + monks" at Galerie Eva Presenhuber in Zürich, Switzerland (2020); "THANKS 4 NOTHING" at Gladstone Gallery, New York, New York (2020); "we are poems" at the Beaux-arts de Paris in Paris, France (2020); "a wall. seven windows. four people. three trees. some clouds. one sun." at Kamel Mennour in Paris, France (2020); "everyone gets lighter" at Kunsthalle Helsinki in Helsinki, Finland (2020); "sunny days" at Guild Hall in East Hampton, New York (2020); "Black White & Grey" at The Albertina Museum in Vienna, Austria (2020); "On the razor’s edge" at Museo Jumex in Mexico City, Mexico (2020) "Habitat" Morcote Public Art Biennale in Morcote, Switzerland (2020); "and suddenly it all blossoms" at The 2nd Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art in Riga, Latvia (2020); "Uplift" at the Xippas in Geneva, Switzerland (2020); "For a Dreamer of Houses" at the Dallas Museum of Art in Dallas, Texas (2020); "The Age of Trees" at the Hayward Gallery in London, United Kingdom (2020); "Multiple Visions" at Sorry We’re Closed in Brussels, Belgium (2020); and "DYWKTCA" at The Corner at Whitman-Walker in Washington, D.C. (2020).
In 2013, Rondinone installed "human nature", an exhibition of nine monumental stone figures in Rockefeller Plaza, New York, organized by Public Art Fund. In 2016, 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. In 2017, Rondinone curated a city-wide exhibition, "Ugo Rondinone: I ♥ John Giorno," which was presented in twelve New York non-profit institutions.
Ugo Rondinone lives and works in New York, New York.
The right question is not “Who are you?”
It is “Who are you not?”
The mirror has not been with us for long. It was only five or six thousand years ago that some creative and industrious soul polished up a flat piece of bronze and voilà—you, only golden.
So it’s interesting, that the mask has been part of the human selfscape for at least 40,000 years—and, given that most would have been made out of degradable materials like leather, twine and feathers, probably 40,000 years longer.
Perhaps they knew what we do not—your face is a prison, a mask is a key. This basic truth lies at the rock bottom of Ugo Rondinone’s new show of eight stone masks, weighing in between three and 14 kilograms. Elemental and prehistoric in design, they are all different, spaped vaguely like hexagons, ovals, hearts, shields or just a good old-fashioned rocky blob, but they are all visual cousins to the legendary chipped-stone hand axe, the first known human tool. Though mostly the size of a human face, Rondinone’s masks are stonily symbolic, with naught but a pair of blank round eyeholes (albeit with teeny crow’s feet) to suggest a face, and wildly unwearable unless you are very strong and very drunk.
Their blank expression is itself a key, opening the interpretation of the object to free-ranging speculation. This is a quality present in much of Rondinone’s work—not unfinished, yet still open to interpretation. Nowhere is this more true than in his monumental towers or boulders cairns, which balance precariously between contemporary spectacle and primeval totemism.
The masks balance on a knife-edge, too—between self and other, gravity and levity, profundity and play, the mercurial and the leaden, horror and honor, the ordinary and the sublime. “I always like to play with two extremes, to walk tightropes between two qualities,” says Rondinone, showing a visitor around his vast studio in an old Harlem church.
The masks’ qualities can also connect to the myriad roles that masks can play and have played over the millennia, from ritual use, dramatic feature, costume party requisite or, most recently, personal protective gear.
But seen lined up along the wall as a collection, the masks become a seductive multiplicity of faces across time and space. Stone ciphers. Stoic guards and goalies. Saturnian pachyderms. Ecstatic hierophants. Mutant lichens. Chary warriors. Quizzical aliens. Retired models.
They are everything and nothing. Expansively plastic in interpretation yet comfortingly concrete in hand. Why pore over your face in a mirror for truth when it’s already so weighed down with everything that you and the world project onto it? Identity is immobility; the mask is manumission.
– David Colman
Ugo Rondinone was born in 1964 in Brunnen, Switzerland.
Rondinone’s recent solo and group exhibitions include "a yellow a brown and a blue candle" at The National Exemplar Gallery in Iowa City, Iowa (2021); "nuns + monks" at Gladstone Gallery in New York, New York (2021); "a sky. a sea. distant mountains. horses. spring" at Sadie Coles HQ in London, United Kingdom (2021); "feeling the void and the rhone" at Kunsthalle Marcel Duchamp in Cully, Switzerland (2021); "a wall. a door. a tree. a lightbulb. winter." at SKMU Sørlandets Kunstmuseum in Kristiansand, Norway (2021); "Ugo Rondinone and Pat Steir" at Galerie Eva Presenhuber in Zurich, Switzerland (2021); "Crocodile Cradle" at PEER Gallery in London, United Kingdom (2021); "Gold & Magic" at ARKEN Museum for Moderne Kuns in Ishøj, Denmark (2021); “Between the Earth and Sky" at Kasmin Gallery in New York, New York (2021); "Horizons" at Lévy Gorvy in Paris, France (2021); "Eternal Seasons” at Lévy Gorvy in Hong Kong, China (2021); "the monk" at Sant’ Andrea de Scaphis in Rome, Italy (2020); "nuns + monks" at Galerie Eva Presenhuber in Zürich, Switzerland (2020); "THANKS 4 NOTHING" at Gladstone Gallery, New York, New York (2020); "we are poems" at the Beaux-arts de Paris in Paris, France (2020); "a wall. seven windows. four people. three trees. some clouds. one sun." at Kamel Mennour in Paris, France (2020); "everyone gets lighter" at Kunsthalle Helsinki in Helsinki, Finland (2020); "sunny days" at Guild Hall in East Hampton, New York (2020); "Black White & Grey" at The Albertina Museum in Vienna, Austria (2020); "On the razor’s edge" at Museo Jumex in Mexico City, Mexico (2020) "Habitat" Morcote Public Art Biennale in Morcote, Switzerland (2020); "and suddenly it all blossoms" at The 2nd Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art in Riga, Latvia (2020); "Uplift" at the Xippas in Geneva, Switzerland (2020); "For a Dreamer of Houses" at the Dallas Museum of Art in Dallas, Texas (2020); "The Age of Trees" at the Hayward Gallery in London, United Kingdom (2020); "Multiple Visions" at Sorry We’re Closed in Brussels, Belgium (2020); and "DYWKTCA" at The Corner at Whitman-Walker in Washington, D.C. (2020).
In 2013, Rondinone installed "human nature", an exhibition of nine monumental stone figures in Rockefeller Plaza, New York, organized by Public Art Fund. In 2016, 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. In 2017, Rondinone curated a city-wide exhibition, "Ugo Rondinone: I ♥ John Giorno," which was presented in twelve New York non-profit institutions.
Ugo Rondinone lives and works in New York, New York.