ART CITIES:N.York-Ugo Rondinone
Ugo Rondinone creates poetic, contemplative works that bridge the natural world, biological time, and artificial matter. Working across monumental sculpture, installation, glasswork, and painting, he distills elemental forms—such as trees, waterfalls, rainbows, and mountains—into vivid, meditative symbols. By combining ancient natural materials with modern digital scale and synthetic mediums, Rondinone captures the delicate threshold between human mortality, geological scales of time, and perpetual transformation.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo; Gladstone Gallery Archive
In his exhibition titled “Waterfall”, Ugo Rondinone presents twelve monumental sculptures. Towering between 11 and 20 feet (3.5 to 6 meters) in height, these vertical, semitranslucent resin pours rise through the gallery in an irregular grid, capturing the raw visual force of natural cascades distilled to their pure form. They fill the space with a striking presence reminiscent of Rondinone’s previous exhibition at Gladstone, bright light shining, which featured chartreuse lightning bolts inspired by inverted tree branches. Concurrently, a complementary presentation of Rondinone’s Murano glass fish sculptures is on view at Gladstone’s space in Brussels.
At the heart of the exhibition is an interplay between three distinct states of matter: transparent synthetic resin, ground pigments made from crushed gemstones, and ashes derived from the artist’s own hair and fingernails. Synthetic resin belongs to the artificial realm of human invention and the technological present, while the gemstones embody millions of years of geological earth time. Embedded within these mineral and synthetic currents are the intimate biological remains of a single human life, bridging the fleeting duration of mortality with the vast temporal scale of the earth.
The physical genesis of each sculpture bridges tactile human gesture and digital scale transformation. Rondinone began by hand-shaping small clay lines wrapped around thin wire skeletons, leaving explicit fingerprint impressions on the fragile surfaces. These initial forms were 3D scanned, enlarged, and digitally modified until the physical traces of the artist’s hands dissolved into fluid contours mimicking rushing water. What originated as a personal bodily mark gradually evolved into an current, an erosion, and a spatial vibration.
Surrounding the central sculpture field are three historical architectural interventions embedded directly into the gallery walls: a cast hand imprint seamlessly set into one wall, an aluminum zero from which incense smoke slowly rises in another, and a bronze keyhole in a third. Together, these subtle spatial interventions frame the vertical momentum of the cascades, inviting viewers to engage with nature not as static scenery, but as an internal, psychic, and spiritual state of perpetual transformation.
Photo: Ugo Rondinone, © Ugo Rondinone, Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery
Info: Gladstone Gallery, 530 W 21st St, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 17/9-31/10/2026, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://gladstonegallery.com/
