SHANGHAI.- The Rockbund Art Museum is showing the very first exhibition in China of the internationally acclaimed artist Ugo Rondinone, born in 1964 in Brunnen, Switzerland, and living in New York since 1997.
Ugo Rondinone’s oeuvre takes up a unique position in the contemporary art scene and his contribution in revisiting the codes and the histories of the visual arts has been exceptional.
Having developed very precise and obsessive series—from clown sculptures to stone figures, target paintings, masks, oversized wax light bulbs, stripe paintings, landscape ink drawings, bronze still-life objects, video and sound installations—Ugo Rondinone advances extremely diverse techniques, combining concepts with performative figures, abstract forms with raw materials, exploring themes of fantasy and desire, branching out in literature and poetry, contemporary cinema and the visual arts.
Paying very close attention to his art projects, Ugo Rondinone always refuses to conceive of his solo exhibitions as a display of artworks but rather as a total art statement, offering the visitor a very strong visual and emotional experience combined with powerful poetic and critical observations.
Ugo Rondinone states: "Since 2007 all my exhibitions have used the natural colors of the material that was used in the production of the work: stone, clay, earth, bronze or aluminum. It's now time to bring back all the colors of the spectrum. This exhibition combines different color works from the past and the present into one unifying installation."
In recent years, Ugo Rondinone has produced a whole set of works related to a dominant black-grey-brown color series. Most major exhibitions for this series included the famous primitive stone sculptures commissioned by the Public Art Fund for the Rockefeller Plaza in New York (Human Nature, 2013), the earth installations and body wax sculptures at M – Museum Leuven (Thank You Silence, 2013), the handmade bronze bird sculptures and black ink landscape paintings at Eva Presenhuber gallery (Kiss Now Kill Later, 2011).
Regarding the exhibition title, the curator Larys Frogier elaborates: “Rondinone’s large rainbow sign BREATHE WALK DIE embodies perfectly how simple and enigmatic, how imperative and simultaneously poetic the affirmation and allure of BREATHE WALK DIE could be. This new neon sign, following others like WE ARE POEMS, HELL YES!, or OUR MAGICAL HOUR seems to point out both raw reality and hidden aspects of our history. The sign encapsulates and makes palpable an unnamed collective desire, and, in turn, inspires a new one: to understand why this hour, for example, is so magical.”
Ugo Rondinone fashioned for the Rockbund Art Museum an all-new stunning visual ensemble of works in which the whole architecture of the museum, performative actors and the visitors are involved.
Space: Step into a colorful wonderland
The groundbreaking new project conceived for the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai initiates a new process into the colorful series. Ugo Rondinone considered how the straight verticality of the Rockbund Art Museum building counterbalances the infinite visual horizons paintings. The vertical architecture and horizons paintings thus combine with each other to open the rooms fully to an unlimited space in which the references to panorama and landscape are subverted as extensions rather than frontiers and boundaries.
The exhibition consists of seven layers, each a different work or group of works:
One new neon sign in rainbow colors has been produced as the title of the exhibition
BREATHE WALK DIE
Horizon wall paintings fully covering the walls of the Museum from the 1st to the 5th floor, each floor showing 3 graduation of colors and the ensemble developing the full color spectrum of the rainbow
A pair of clown shoes, part of a group of seven shoes each representing a day of the week, greets visitors at the entrance to the exhibition.
A performance of 40 clowns existing in the gallery spaces, titled ‘vocabulary of solitude’.
Circle paintings hanging on the walls of each gallery, like setting suns on the horizon.
A work titled 'love invents us', 1996, comprises different color filters covering all the windows of the foyers, infusing daylight inside the Museum with a new experience of colors.
The sound installation ‘dog days are over’ from 1996.
This suspended colored architectonic space is somehow subverted by other new productions, coaxing the viewer into a meditative state like the blurred, brightly colored concentric rings of his Mandala paintings. These target paintings crack the museum’s horizons with holes as reversed perspectives, as though it was not only the viewer who was looking at the painting but also the painting pervading the viewer beyond his own ocular spectrum.
Clowns: take meditation as action
Forty clown figures with colorful costumes, white masks, black eyelashes, and rainbow wigs are positioned in different places of the museum to perform (in)active acts: sleeping and meditation.This installation of clowns is titled “vocabulary of solitude” and each clown is named after an event in the cycle of a day in the life of a solitary person.
The exhibition BREATHE WALK DIE conspicuously displays the “color in excess”. This abuse of color is particularly enhanced by the presence of forty live clowns wearing multicolored costumes. Every day from the beginning to the end of the exhibition, the performers will occupy different spots inside the museum, engaging in very strange and unexpected time-space relations with visitors. Childish, fantastic, candy-like, surreal—these could be the first impressions stemming from such an environment. But beyond this emotional and visual surface there is a deeply alienating experience which develops between the clowns and the visitors. Indeed, in the exhibition space, the clowns are not requested to actively entertain the viewers but, on the contrary, they sit and lie on the ground, sleeping and meditating, excluding themselves from the existing space and distancing themselves from the viewers. In point of fact, the clowns do not see the colorful space; they don masks that are actually casts of their own faces, with eyes fully closed, denying the architecture, environment, and visitors in order to build other extended horizons beyond symbols and narration. Their faces are strangely white with long, black eyelashes, as if they were marked as utterly sensitive aliens embarked on a floating journey. The “non-action” of the clowns’ performance infiltrates the space, reversing the colors in excess with a critical question about how to exceed norms and limits: what is the feeling of being refused? How to refuse to do what people tell you to do? How do we distribute the assumed roles and actions into our societies? It is worth noticing that each of the clowns will receive from the artist a name like a verb of action, echoing the imperative neon sign BREATHE WALK DIE. This “name-dropping” process is also another substantial element of the show: with titles and names, Rondinone powerfully acts out language beyond the limits of language.
Visitors: from immersion to contribution
Sound speakers have been placed in the museum’s staircase and will activate the artist’s sound installation ‘dog days are over’, 1996.
Children are invited to produce drawings of rainbow during regular workshops. The drawings have been hung on and progressively fill in the walls of the sixth floor café.
