Ugo Rondinone

born 1964 in Brunnen, Switzerland
lives and works in Zurich, Switzerland and New York, USA

Like the great Alberto Giacometti, a sculptor of sombre aesthetic scruples, Ugo Rondinone was born in Switzerland to Italian parents. He later studied at Hochschule für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna.

A multimedia artist, Rondinone often joins forces with other artists like Urs Fischer in collaborative installations.

Rondinone’s wide-ranging interests and idiosyncratic style suggests a person tunnelling into his own psyche. His audacious choice of literary antecedents seems a good way of trying to get to grips with the nature of that psychosphere. He draws inspiration from not-so-well-known yet brilliant writers, such as New York performance poet John Giorno (star of Andy Warhol’s 1963 film Sleep) and Edmond Jabès, a writer known for his meditations on exile in the desert of language (the title for Rondinone’s project, Clockwork for oracle, was taken from one of his poems). However, the novel that most influenced him was Joris Karl Huysmans’ Against nature; Rondinone has said that the way in which the protagonist builds his own world in a castle, without any outside contact, is very much the way he sees artists.

Controlling every aspect of a space, and all the corresponding and contrasting elements – such as clowns, mirrors, targets and windows – Rondinone often transforms art sites into just such a self-contained world. Life is undecipherable and repetitive, controlled by time and order, while emotions are pesky and chaos stirs.

Like his compatriot Giacometti, Rondinone knows the paradoxical rules of a game where the closer you get to the truth, the further you are away, or the more conscious you are of your distance. The payoff: a feeling of potent compassion and the startling thrill of art, as a place where detached contemplation can yield some access to life’s engulfing mysteries.

Read more about Ugo Rondinone’s 2003 Kaldor project.

See also Ugo Rondinone, Galerie Eva Presenhuber.