530 West 21st Street, New York, NY 10011 November 6 - December 23, 2010 Opens Saturday November 6, 6-8pm
Gladstone Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works by Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone. Continuing to offer a glimpse into his widely discursive practice through meditations on the experiential qualities of the everyday, Rondinone draws upon a multiplicity of artistic tropes and approaches to create immersive and affectively charged environments. Skillfully traversing the boundaries between public and private, interior and exterior, truth and falsity, Rondinone reveals and displaces the processes of how cultural meaning is produced and distributed. Spanning a wide range of material production, from video to neon signage, this exhibition focuses on new figurative sculptures, which like the whole of Rondinone's work consistently testifies to the strangeness and beauty of human life.
Since the early 1990’s Rondinone has been developing a specific formal and conceptual language around figuration that includes an expansive group of sculptural and photographic self-portraits as well as his clown series. Established as a thematic extension of these earlier works, this exhibition continues to explore similar aesthetic strategies of engagement in which Rondinone generates often unsettling contexts that reflect upon existentialist expressions of the human condition. Made from a mixture of wax and earth pigments, these seven human-scale figures modestly line the walls of the gallery space, each positioned in a pose of hermetic contemplation that gives way to a site of serenity. While the exhibition title "nude" most commonly connotes bare or naked, it also implies a kind of primary, exposed and reductive state, which Rondinone mirrors by stripping the scene of narrative action, a decision that momentarily suspends the outside world and its referential character in an appeal to the conditions of our present state of consciousness. Accentuating the vast dimensions of the room and its abyss-like emptiness, Rondinone's interplay of sculpture and architecture elicits a sensorial encounter, highlighting both the passivity of the figures and the spatial void at the core of this scenario. By staging this setting for existential reflection, Rondinone plays with the co-constitutive forces of artifice and authenticity, unfixing the grounds upon which they operate and allowing the imminent ruminations upon Being to briefly and reflexively take hold among his poetic reshuffling of truth and meaning.
Born in 1964 in Brunnen, Switzerland, Rondinone’s work has most recently been the subject of solo exhibitions at Kunsthaus Aargauer, Switzerland and Museo de Arte Contemporéneo de Castilla y León, Spain. In 2007 he represented Switzerland in the 52nd Venice Biennial as well as curated “The Third Mind” at Palais de Tokyo in Paris. He currently lives and works in New York.
Rondinone’s five tree sculptures will concurrently be on view at the IBM Building at 590 Madison Avenue in New York.
For further information please contact Sascha Crasnow +1 212 206 9300 or scrasnow@gladstonegallery.com Gallery Hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 10am-6pm
515 West 24th Street Wangechi Mutu “Hunt Bury Flee” October 30 through December 4
530 West 21st Street Marisa Merz “Living Sculpture” October 7 through November 20
12 Rue du Grand Cerf, Brussels Sarah Lucas “Penetralia” November 18 through December 23 Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Friday, 10am-6pm, Sat 12pm-6pm
Icelandic nature is prominent in Eliasson's work, and his artistic relationship with it often involves collection or documentation that is scientific in tone. The country becomes a sensory laboratory where ideas can be developed and evolved into art, as evidenced in the multiple photographic series that would seem to witness a near compulsive need for collecting.
TAKA ISHII GALLERY, Tokyo presents NOBUYOSHI ARAKI - EroReal
7 June - 27 July 2013
Magazine pin-ups aren't interesting, are they? Especially now that they're shot digitally, they lack eroticism. They're doing it wrong. That's why I had to come in. It's not about an ambiance or concept; it's about being real. Not realism, but real?ero-real. I have to say it straight. It's not about nudity; clothed subjects can be erotic.
The approach, London presents JACK LAVENDER - Dreams Chunky
6 June - 28 July 2013
Jack Lavender draws from a world of mass-produced objects, transforming their singular banality through their composition within such structures as grids and metal armatures. Sitting between the disciplines of painting, sculpture and collage, Lavender brings different elements together to create a new entity.
