primitive

The storm, the waterfall, the dust, the horizon, and other earthly and celestial things – so are named Ugo Rondinone’s little bird sculptures, the flock of which took up residence at Artspace for the 19th Biennale of Sydney (2014). Each is an individual entity – a strange little character, assigned a tremendous name that evokes elements of the earth or the heavens – and together they represent the natural world brought into the artificial place of the gallery.

Rondinone has fashioned his large cast of fowl using the most economical of means: the works are hand sculpted in clay, now cast to bronze. The viewer can still see the hand and thumb marks in the lumpen mud material. In choosing birds as embodiments of the elements, Rondinone is linking most specifically to the eastern and Arabic histories of Chinese, Japanese and Egyptian art, which have long traditions of assigning attributes and ideals to living creatures.

It may be that Rondinone’s primitive (2011–12), as he has collectively named the pieces, belongs to the Kantian notion of the sublime, which is to be found in ideas of absolute totality and freedom. His birds represent a kind of liberation from civilisation’s attempt to categorise and formalise nature. Small though they are, these primitives dominate space and time in an interestingly perverse way. Random, and spatially opportunistic, they hold a strange power over the visitor who must pay heed to their individual whereabouts.

Swiss-born, New York-based Rondinone works with an assortment of materials across a variety of media including drawing, painting, sculpture, video and installation. The artist is renowned for creating works that explore the depths of human emotion, resonating with the psyche and imagination, and navigating boundaries between dreams and reality.

Themes of isolation and disenchantment recur throughout Rondinone’s oeuvre, made palpable to the viewer through motifs such as life-sized sculptures of mute clowns in various states of repose. An example of this can be seen in if there were anywhere but desert. Wednesday (2000), part of a series of seven works that feature slumbering clowns placed around the gallery. Referencing Bruce Nauman’s 1987 work titled Clown Torture, Rondinone plays with ideas of alienation by creating a tangible disconnection between the inert figure of the normally vibrant entertainer and the audience.

In clockwork for oracles (2011), Rondinone examines the passing of time and alludes to connections between the celestial and the commonplace through the title, which is taken from a poem by Edmund Jabès, a writer known for his works contemplating Judaism and exile. Composed of 52 wall-mounted windows, one for each week of the year, set against a wallpaper of whitewashed newsprint, clockwork for oracles becomes activated by the presence of the audience. The multicoloured panes, reminiscent of stained-glass windows often found in places of worship, capture the movement of the viewer like fleeting apparitions in their reflective surfaces.

In contrast to some of his slicker, more colourful works, Rondinone’s recent exhibition, ‘soul’, presented at Gladstone Gallery in New York and Galerie Eva Presenhuber in Zurich, comprised a multitude of sculptures made from roughly hewn blocks of bluestone stacked to form anthropomorphic figures. The sculptures, all similar yet completely individual, are each named for a different emotional state (the keen, the considerate, the contented) and demonstrate visible tool marks and traces of the stone’s natural state. The contrast between the rough, imperfect surface of the primal figures and the smooth concrete of their pedestals reflects humanity’s relationship to both the constructed and the natural world.

Rondinone’s work has been exhibited extensively all over the world, with solo shows at Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv (2013); M Museum Leuven (2013); Art Institute of Chicago (2013); Galerie Krobath, Vienna (2012); The Common Guild, Glasgow (2012); Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich (2011); Gladstone Gallery, New York (2010); Sadie Coles HQ, London (2009); SculptureCenter, New York (2008); Hayward Gallery, London (2008); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2006); and Centre Pompidou, Paris (2003). Rondinone’s work has also been included in prestigious group exhibitions worldwide, including Yokohama Triennale (2011); 52nd Venice Biennale (2007); 2nd Prague Biennale (2005); 7th Biennale de Lyon (2003); Liverpool Biennale (2002); and 23rd São Paulo Biennial (1996). In 2013, Rondinone created a major work, Human Nature, in Rockefeller Center for New York’s Public Art Fund.