About the Artwork
Ugo Rondinone’s summer moon, 2011, belongs to a long-running series of sculptures of trees. From the mid-2000s, Rondinone embarked on a series of life-size sculptures of ancient olive trees in white-painted aluminium.
‘Through a cast olive tree you can not only experience the lapse of real time, that is lived time, frozen in its given form, but through this transformation also a different calibrated temporality. Time can be experienced as a lived abstraction, where the shape is formed by the accumulation of time and wind force.’
– Ugo Rondinone, 2006
Year: 2011
© Ugo Rondinone, Courtesy of the artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London. Photo: © Nick Turpin
Material
Cast aluminium, white enamel
Dimensions
600 x 550 x 550 cm
Artist Biography
Ugo Rondinone
Ugo Rondinone (b. 1964, Brunnen, Switzerland) lives and works in New York and studied at Hochschule für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna (1986-90). He has long embraced a fluid range of forms and media. As a whole, his work constitutes a complex network of responses to social and physical structures. By allowing himself such formal and thematic freedom, Rondinone creates the conditions for an expansive emotional range. His work has become recognised for its ability to channel both psychological expressiveness and profound insight in the human condition and the relationship between human being and nature. His work is held in public and private collections around the world. He has exhibited internationally with major solo exhibitions including burn shine fly, Scuola Grande di San Giovanni Evangelista, Venice, presented on the occasion of the 59th La Biennale di Venezia (2022); nude in the landscape and your age and my age and the age of the rainbow, both presented at Belvedere 21, Vienna (2021); a sky . a sea . distant mountains . horses . spring ., Sadie Coles HQ, Kingly and Davies Street, London (2021); the rhone + the void, Kunsthalle Marcel Duchamp, Cully (2021); a wall. a door. a tree. a lightbulb. winter., SKMU Sørlandets Kunstmuseum, Kristiansand (2021); we are poems, Beaux-Arts de Paris, Paris (2019); everyone gets lighter, Helsinki Festival and Kunsthalle Helsinki, Helsinki (2019); good evening beautiful blue, The Bass, Miami Beach (2017); your age and my age and the age of the rainbow, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow (2017); Seven Magic Mountains, presented by Art Production Fund & the Nevada Museum of Art, Nevada (2016); Vocabulary of Solitude, Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2016); thank you silence, M Museum, Leuven, Belgium (2013); we run through a desert on burning feet, all of us are glowing our faces look twisted, Art Institute of Chicago (2013); human nature, Public Art Fund, Rockefeller Plaza, New York (2013) and The Night of Lead (Die Nacht aus Blei), Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau, Switzerland (2010). Forthcoming museum solo exhibitions include vocabulary of solitude, Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City, and life time, a survey exhibition at Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Frankfurt, both opening in June 2022.