Ugo Rondinone

Conditions were unsanitary and unsafe, and it was ultimately the outcry that followed Carlo Levi’s 1945 account of his time there, “Christ Stopped at Eboli,” that led the government to relocate Sassi di Matera’s residents, including Benito Rondinone’s family, to nearby low-income housing.

His father's upbringing has contributed greatly to Rondinone's work, influencing his extensive body of work in stone as well as his interest in southern Italy's olive trees.

Ugo Rondinone (born November 30, 1964) is a Swiss-born artist widely recognized for his mastery of several different media—most prominently sculpture, drawing and painting, but also photography, architecture, video and sound installation—in the largely figurative works he has made for exhibitions in galleries, museums and outdoor public spaces around the world.

He has never limited himself to a particular material, no more than he has to a single discipline.

Lead, wood, wax, bronze, stained glass, ink, paint, soil and stone are all tools in a creative arsenal that the artist has employed to extend the Romantic tradition in works that are as sensitive to the passage of time as to the nuances of body language and the spoken word.

Ugo Rondinone was born in 1964 to Italian parents Benito and Eufemia Rondinone in the resort town of Brunnen, Switzerland.

His father was born in Matera, Italy, an ancient city built into limestone cliffs and the site of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ and Pier Paolo Pasolini's The Gospel According to St. Matthew, both of which cement its status as a venerated religious site.

Benito Rondinone was a mason who built stone walls by hand.

Rondinone moved to Zurich in 1983 to become the assistant to Hermann Nitsch and studied at the Hochschule für angewandte Kunst in Wien, from 1986 to 1990, where he studied with the artist Bruno Gironcoli.

Rondinone also attended Vienna’s Academy of Applied Art, studying under Ernst Caramelle.

In 1985 while in school, Rondinone met fellow student Eva Presenhuber, who would become his art dealer in Zurich and his nominal wife.

If one refers to the official index of Ugo Rondinone's works, his corpus originates with a series of sculptures of flowers in plaster and Vaseline dated 1988.

The artist commonly starts his trajectory, however, with landscapes drawn in India ink, in a style reminiscent of both seventeenth-century Dutch art and German Romanticism.

Based on preparatory drawings he made during country walks outside of Vienna, these nostalgic landscapes introduced a number of elements that can also be found in his later works: a protocol leading him to create artworks based on handmade “studies” that, via several “transports” or transfers potentially incorporating steps delegated to independent contractors, result in another image; an attraction to variations on a single theme; the use of “cycles” and “systems,” in particular those conveyed by nomenclature in the titles he attributes to his works; and last, the creation of work pertaining to his autobiography.

Those early landscapes were, in fact, made in response to loss, the artist’s partner, Manfred Kirchner, having died of AIDS in 1988.

“In the midst of the AIDS crisis,” Rondinone recalls, “I turned away from my grief and found a spiritual guard rail in nature, a place for comfort, regeneration and inspiration.

In nature, you enter a space where the sacred and the profane, the mystical and the secular vibrate against one another.” The first landscape was painted on February 23, 1989.

Rondinone would show three others, produced in March, June and October respectively, in an exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Luzern in Switzerland that same year, in which his approach to presentation might be considered the matrix of his exhibitions to come.

One cannot dissociate Rondinone’s exhibitions from his works, which as a result evolve in forms of presentation that are ceaselessly reinvented by the artist.

As with the way in which his works are subject to variations, he modifies the way their “content” and “container” are shown from one exhibition to the next.

These modifications can be infinitesimal or can, on the contrary, involve profound changes.

They can open up new perspectives or displace them.

Rondinone emerged as an artist in the 1990s.

His paintings are noted for their brightly colored, concentric rings of target-shapes; and strictly black and white landscapes of gnarled trees.

Benito grew up in Sassi di Matera, a series of Paleolithic-era cave dwellings, which was in 1993 declared a Unesco World Heritage Site but was still a community while Benito was growing up.

In 1997, Rondinone was accepted into MoMA PS1's International Studio Program and moved to New York City, where he continues to live and work.

In New York he began a relationship with the artist, writer, and poet John Giorno, after the two met at a poetry reading at St. Mark's Church in which Giorno was participating.

Since 1997, Rondinone has included the practice of making signs in his varied oeuvre; he takes phrases from pop songs and everyday exclamations and makes them into rainbow-hued, neon-lit sculptures, including Hell, Yes (2001).

Rondinone and Giorno collaborated on a 1999 exhibition, which developed into a romantic relationship which would last until Giorno's death in 2019.

Another series of installations, Clockwork for Oracles (2008-2010) consists of mirrored works that are hung salon-style over a wall of pages from the local paper sourced at the time of installation.

Rondinone’s totem-like figures have been installed all over the world, from the Jardin des Tuileries in Paris (2009) to the Yokohama Triennale (2011).

Rondinone later created a series that includes bronze-cast birds (primitive, 2011), horses (primal, 2013) and fish (primordial, 2018).

In a 2013 article for The New York Times, David Colman wrote about the piece of limestone that Rondinone wears around his neck on a leather strap, which had been passed down in his family for many years: “A stone, un sasso, drilled with a hole, it was worn around the neck as a kind of proto-ID.

Different stones were worn, 24-7, by different workers in the Sassi, depending on which landowner they were bound to.

Benito had never worn it, having left the area while still young, but his father, Frederico, had worn it and given it to his son, just as Frederico’s father had worn it and given it to him, and his father before him.” Rondinone's brother Luca, seven years his junior, lives in Brunnen.

In Brunnen, Rondinone grew up trilingual, speaking French, Italian, and German.

In 2013 he exhibited an installation called Human Nature at Rockefeller Center, a group of nine monumental figures made of rough-hewn slabs of bluestone from a quarry in Northern Pennsylvania, resembling rudimentary rock totems.

Similarly, Soul (2013) is a group of 37 figures from bluestone found in upstate New York, ranging from just under 3 feet to nearly 7 feet tall.

Rondinone is widely known for his temporary, large-scale land art sculpture, Seven Magic Mountains (2016–2021), with its seven fluorescently-painted totems of large, car-size stones stacked 32 feet high.

Another sculptural installation, Vocabulary of Solitude (2016), involves 45 sculptures of clowns named after and positioned doing everyday tasks such as ‘wake, sit, walk and shower’.