Ugo Rondinone. thank you silence
October 7, 2013
For over twenty years, Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone has been developing an oeuvre in a variety of media, from painting, graphic design, sculpture and photography to video and audio. His work is often based on themes and motifs from our everyday environment (light bulbs, masks, trees, etc.) that acquire a poetic dimension by being isolated, expanded or given a specific material treatment. With respect to their form, his installations contain diverse references to the history of art and popular culture. His work varies from landscapes drawn in Indian ink, reminiscent of Romanticism, to rainbow coloured light sculptures that refer to sixties psychedelia.
For the first time in Belgium, the thank you silence exhibition at M - Museum Leuven brings together five groups of works created by Ugo Rondinone in the last three years. These groups of works relate to the artist’s interest in nature and mankind. The bronze sculptures entitled primitive are a series of hand-moulded birds named after natural phenomena. Clocks made of stained-glass introduce the notion of time into the exhibition. thank you silence also features the nude series of hyper-realistic, introverted figures cast in a mixture of wax and earth pigments. Also on show is a brand-new series of four monumental soil landscapes, each of which is experienced from a different perspective: hanging landscape, standing landscape, triangle landscape and tilted landscape. Specially for the exhibition Ugo Rondinone also created another new work entitled your age and my age and the age of the sun. This required the collaboration of children from the city of Leuven who produced over 300 drawings of the sun, which are presented in a concrete box in the upstairs gallery at M. Finally, the exhibition includes a number of date paintings and the work thank you silence which lends its name to the show. Through the various groups of works on display Ugo Rondinone constructs a carefully considered transition from nature to man and introduces links between abstract ideas associated with them.
> elaborated press release + biography attached
curator of this exhibition: Eva Wittocx, head of exhibitions contemporary art
This exhibition was made possible thanks to the support of Pro Helvetia.
