MILWAUKEE, WIS.- Sculpture Milwaukee announced today that Ugo Rondinone has been appointed as the Guest Curator of Sculpture Milwaukee’s 2022 exhibition. The exhibition will launch in June 2022 and run through October of 2023. Now in its sixth edition, Sculpture Milwaukee is a non-profit producing annual exhibitions of contemporary sculpture with a dedicated focus on public art practices.
The exhibition, entitled Nature Doesn’t Know About Us, will include “thirteen works by thirteen artists who combine skeptical clarity and at times humor-tinged desire to locate the intersection of spiritual and physical presence in our daily life,” according to Rondinone. He adds: “The natural world serves as a doorway into a highly rarefied metaphysical realm where the sea of consciousness surges against the tangible world. Here all is in flux as distinctions between self and soul, body and spirit, past and present, mortification and bliss, confinement and escape all blur and waver. The exhibition celebrates the disparate elements of the Earth, while exploring the human connection to nature.”
Michelle Grabner, who served as Guest Curator of the 2021 exhibition along with Theaster Gates, and now sits on the Executive Committee of Sculpture Milwaukee’s board of directors, notes: “Working with Ugo—an extraordinary artist who thinks deeply about the poetic interconnections between the natural world and human artifice—will throw into relief powerful examples of sculptural form and artistic attentiveness examining the complexity of living systems in the urban environment.”
Of the organization, Sculpture Milwaukee’s 2021 Visiting Critic, Kenny Schachter says “Art is about freedom, and Sculpture Milwaukee untethers art from its physical moorings of place—be it studio, gallery or institution—and repositions it in the city. The immediacy of artworks directly in front of viewers, whether they are passersby or visitors to the program, creates unexpected, ad hoc encounters that only enhances both the experience of the works and the context they temporarily reside in.”
Ugo Rondinone (Swiss, b. 1964) is a New York-based artist and curator. Rondinone works across a range of media, producing works and exhibitions that encompass sculpture, painting, video, sound, photography and installation. Exhibitions of his work have been held at Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich; Sadie Coles HQ, London; and as part of the 52nd Venice Biennale. He has curated exhibitions at Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Secession, Vienna; and Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York, among others.
