Ugo Rondinone

UGO RONDINONE Brunnen (Switzerland), 1964

Ugo Rondinone is a Swiss installation artist best known for his spray paintings and video environments that bear a strong sense of melancholy and alienation. The artist is based in New York and his themes usually try to find a middle ground between fantasy and reality, dancing on a razor’s edge of euphoria and depression. This phenomenal artist has been active for years now, never failing to bring us fresh and original pieces that continue to amaze us to this day. Besides installations, Ugo is also quite active in creating sculpture pieces. Ugo Rondinone was born during the year of 1964, in Brunnen, a town in Switzerland. He was born to Italian parents and started showing signs of artistic tendencies from early on. In 1983, Ugo moved to Zurich in order to become the assistant to Hermann Nitsch, an Austrian artist who works in experimental and multimedia modes. This was Ugo’s first contact with professional art. Rondinone acquired his education by studying at the Hochschule für Angewandte Kunst in Vienna, where he graduated in 1990. His official career started in the 1990s, in a time he created a series of circular paintings that were simply titled using numbers and many critics thought they resembled Kenneth Noland’s target works. Soon he became the subject of international attention as his work started to expand and evolve. Technically speaking, Rondinone worked with different media, such as photography, video, sculpture, and drawing – and he also regularly used more or less familiar quotations from literature and popular culture, appropriately placing them where he saw fit. Ever since his early days as a professional artist, Rondinone has shown what type of pieces he likes creating – the ones that tempt the viewer into a meditative state, much alike the way aforementioned target-shaped paintings lure the audience into their brightly colored, concentric rings.

ARCANGELO SASSOLINO L’Inconveniente, 2019 Ski, steel, and steel wire 65 3/4 x 15 3/4 x 3 1/2 in (167 x 40 x 9 cm)