Ugo Rondinone: Pure Sunshine
1st Edition
Published on 30. November 2017
Book
Hardback
316 pages
978-3-03764-505-5 (ISBN)
Description
The complete Target Paintings
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, aluminum 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 Landscapes paintings, the Stripe paintings, and the Target paintings. In the first volume dedicated to the Target 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."
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, aluminum 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 Landscapes paintings, the Stripe paintings, and the Target paintings. In the first volume dedicated to the Target 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."