ART-PRESENTATION: Ugo Rondinone-The sun at 4pm

The exhibition “the sun at 4pm” continues Ugo Rondinone’s examination of the link between the natural world and the human condition. Extending the artist’s mining of the German Romantic Movement, and particularly Caspar David Friedrich, as a primary source of reference, the four distinct bodies of work on view “mountain”, “sun”, “waterfall” and “cloud”,  present a setting wherein the commonplace of the everyday gives way to the sublimity of environmental phenomena.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Gladstone Gallery Archive

Ugo Rondinone’s “mountain” sculptures consist of rocks vertically stacked on concrete plinths of varying sizes. Austere in their reference to Minimalist composition and titling, the artist mitigates severity in both the Day-Glo coloring of the boulders, as well as the deferential nod to the tradition of stone stacking, a practice seen from prehistoric dolmens to contemporary cairns. Forever preserved in a state of precariousness, the “mountain” sculptures also manifest a suspension of time. This notion of temporality carries over to Rondinone’s new series of sculptures, “sun”, composed of branches cast in aluminum and then gilded, the world’s oldest gauge of time is rendered static. As the exhibition’s poetic title indicates, this interior presentation of an exterior natural occurrence calls into question not only our conception of time’s passage, but also the ways in which society turns nature into artificial intervals. Modeled by hand in clay and cast in aluminum, the spiraling “waterfall” works seem to simultaneously collapse downwards and expand upwards, creating a visual tension between gravity and ethereality. The ”cloud” canvases capture a similar paradox, in which the painted abstract surface points to an infinite celestial world beyond the gallery’s walls, but the cartoon-like borders root the works in an unambiguous literalism. By rendering such incongruity through beautiful visual means, Rondinone sets the stage for an existential reflection on artificial versus natural, banal versus sublime.

Info: Gladstone Gallery, 530 West 21st Street, New York, Duration 23/9-29/10/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.gladstonegallery.com