· 2017
Born in 1964, New York-based Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone is one of the leading voices in the contemporary visual arts.Using photography, video, painting, drawing, sculpture, sound, and text in turn, he is a virtuoso of forms and techniques. Rondinone particularly enjoys destabilizing the viewers' perceptions and unsettling their certainties by developing surprising sensorial environments. Rearranging content and formal elements through a personal poetic filter while drawing directly on the outside world, he envelops the audience in a synesthetic experience.The artist has developed very precise and repetitive series--clown sculptures and videos, target acrylic paintings on linen, rubber masks, aluminium 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 Landscape paintings, the Horizon paintings, and the Sun paintings.In the first volume dedicated to the Sun paintings (1992-2012), critic and art historian Lionel Bovier offers a visual and perceptual analysis, while Morgan Falconer examines the main characteristics of this series in relation to Rondinone's work and biography, stating that, "If the circles do have a connection to Rondinone's biography, it is allegorical. A motif in his work links to a moment of life experience just as a part does to a whole, or as a link in a chain sits next to its partners: we see only the link that Rondinone chooses to illuminate, the rest is in darkness."
Echoing Rimbaud's "Je suis un autre", Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone uses the question of identity as a main theme in his multimedia creations. His works are a balancing act of ambiguities -- from art to commerce, the fashionably hip to melancholic withdrawal, seduction to rejection. Exemplifying these undercurrents are his photomontages, in which he superimposes his face onto the bodies of famous models in sometimes elegant, sometimes lascivious poses. This book documents Rondinone's activity over the past six years, presenting a variety of works -- diary entries in the style of underground comics; videos capturing the banality of everyday life; hypnotizing circle pictures; clowns; hermetic spatial installations; and monumental brush and ink landscape pictures.
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This monograph is devoted to Ugo Rondinone. Using photography, video, painting, drawing, sculpture, sound, and text by turns, he is a virtuoso of forms and techniques.
An exhaustive monograph, released on the occasion of Rondinone's first solo exhibition in a British institution. It documents certain pieces and most of his solo exhibitions over the last twenty years.
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· 2024
The first comprehensive monograph surveying the expansive twenty-five-plus-year career of the highly influential artist, known for his rainbow-colored paintings, drawings, and emotive ceramic facepots. McCarthy is known for his gestural and intuitive artwork. His brightly colored paintings, with loose brushwork, depict figures in action: dancing, surfing, fishing, and skateboarding often against a rainbow-colored background. His ongoing series of ceramic facepots delight with their hand-built immediacy and invested emotionality. McCarthy who worked on fishing boats near Catalina Island and cites the Pacific Ocean as a lasting influence on his work. The beautifully curated book includes an 8-page gatefold and a French-fold jacket, which opens up to a collectible foldout poster.
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· 2003
· 2000
Written and drawn in Indian ink, Ugo Rondinone's Diaries have played an important role in the Swiss artist's oeuvre since the early 1990s. The Diaries are conceived as notations covering an entire year, and titled 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996 etc.--yet both the contents and the titles of the works are completely fictitious. In his sheets, formally inspired by underground comics, Rondinone blends fiction with the mimesis of authenticity, leading readers in and out of intimate--and lonely--spaces and times. These works constitute a kind of report about subjective experience sounding out, bearing, manipulating, and stylizing the borders of collective experience, testing the limits of boredom, rapture, love, failure, and excess. The artist's book Hell, Yes newly regroups various elements of Rondinone's oeuvre--he translates the illustrations and text of his Diaries into photography and printed text, combining his photographic series In the Sweet Years Remaining with the 1998 Diary into a filmic whole. Also included here is an appendix that features, for the first time, all of Rondinone's diary texts in English.