13 October – 21 November 2009 69 South Audley St London W1
For his latest solo show at Sadie Coles HQ, Ugo Rondinone is displaying new sculptures from his ongoing still.life. series. Tree trunks, walnuts, potatoes and other everyday objects and materials have been cast in lead-filled bronze, echoing the lowly or perishable items traditionally depicted in still life paintings. Rondinone’s subjects also glance back to the simple materials of arte povera in the 1960s and after. Yet Rondinone inflects that movement’s methodology of appropriation, supplanting the concept of the readymade with a process of artful and painstaking fabrication.
As the show’s title implies, Rondinone’s subjects have been stripped down and re-contextualized both through their transposition into the gallery space and their transmutation into the incongruous bronze and lead medium. The pine tree sculptures traverse the gallery floor and wall like an architectural framework, acquiring a monumental quality even in their lopped, ‘denuded’ state. The tree is a recurring motif in Rondinone’s work and evidences a quixotic pastoral strain that characterises many of his sculptures and drawings.
Rondinone’s minimalist arrangements of bronze potatoes or polished stones draw upon Modernist sculpture in the way they accentuate the sculptural properties of quotidian forms and throwaway items. The textured surface of the cast cardboard likewise takes on a painterly or malerische dimension. Yet the bald ‘ordinariness’ of Rondinone’s subjects endures owing to the mastery of their trompe l’oeil.
In this respect, Nude reflects the long tradition of still life – from the Dutch masters to Cézanne – of apparent naturalism underpinned by compositional artifice. Moreover, the sculptures possess the same sense of time suspended and death held at bay, almost like an intake of breath that remains perpetually and impossibly withheld. As the title still.life. suggests, the sculptures represent a self-contained, frozen moment – weighted and isolated with lead. The bronzes’ lead cores reinforce the notion of heaviness pulling them towards the ground. Time is thickened and slowed into space. The lead-filled bronze casts constitute a stay against the passage of time, and revert to the ideas of impact, isolation and passivity that run through Rondinone’s art. Yet paradoxically, in so doing, they mount a melancholy reflection on their subjects’ inexorable transience.
Ugo Rondinone (Swiss, b. 1964) has exhibited internationally; recent solo shows include the Festival d’Automne, Paris, 2009; MUSAC, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla, Léon (2008); the 2007 52nd International Art Exhibition Biennale, Venice, Italy, with Urs Fischer; Art on the Plaza, New York, presented by Creative Time, New York, 2007; and the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London in 2006. In 2007 he curated the show The Third Mind at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris. Next year, Rondinone will have solo shows at Kunstmuseum Aarau, Switzerland, and Louisiana Museum of Contemporary Art, Denmark. Ugo Rondinone lives and works in New York and Zürich.
JOHN BOCK
13 October – 21 November 2009 9 Balfour Mews London W1
John Bock’s new show with Sadie Coles HQ takes the form of an installation of seven new sculptures. The walls of the Balfour Mews gallery space have been saturated with colour to house Bock’s absurdist and theatrical assemblages. Concocted from familiar household objects – a suitcase, cushions, an empty bottle – the works have a peculiarly machine-like appearance, and form sculptural analogies to Freud’s mechanistic conception of the human psyche.
Strampellümmel – a cat’s cradle of pulleys and struts on top of a table – vaguely evokes the reels of a film projector or sewing machine, while ultimately evading easy, associative interpretation. The Dead Eyes of London, which takes its name from a German melodramatic crime film of 1965, consists of a simple wooden cabinet that has been turned into a perplexing mutant object, a hollow box with a smashed-through screen.
Excising objects from their normal contexts to form nonsensical aggregates, Bock’s sculptures are strongly resonant of Dada – notably Kurt Schwitters’s Merz paintings with their bolted together rubbish and driftwood – as well as Surrealism’s tendency for irrational juxtaposition, and the anti-aesthetic assemblage art of the mid twentieth century. Several of Bock’s titles are nonsense composites of real words – Fingernagelzwillingszeit (meaning ‘fingernail twin time’) – mirroring the hybridised form of the works themselves.
Bock’s sculptures frequently serve as props within his elaborate performances and video works, which have a pervasive ‘Theatre of the Absurd’ aspect. In their embodiment of the histrionic theatricality of Bock’s other work, these pieces constitute the elements of an unbounded gesamtkunstwerk. And yet there is also an entropic undercurrent to each of the sculptures – they seem broken, or impossibly fragile and teetering on the brink of collapse.
John Bock was born in Gribbohm, Germany, in 1965. He studied at the Hochschüle für bildende Künste, Hamburg, Germany. Recent solo shows include Palms at Red Cat, Los Angeles, in 2008; John Bock : 2 handbags in a pickle, INSA Art Space, Korea, in 2008; and John Bock. Films, Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, in 2007. He has had major exhibitions in numerous museums and galleries worldwide including a solo show at Frac Provence-Alpes-Cote d’Azur, Marseille, France, 2005. He has participated in various group shows including Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art, Barbican Art Gallery, London, and Laughing in a Foreign Language, Hayward Gallery, London, both in 2008. John Bock: Maltreated Frigate, a monograph of his work, was published by Walther Koenig Ltd, 2007. John Bock lives and works in Berlin.
SARAH LUCAS, NUDS
Sadie Coles HQ off-site, 13 Dover Street, London W1 Tuesday–Saturday 12–6, by appointment 12 October – 07 November 2009
For further information please contact James Cahill on +44 [0] 20 7493 8611 or james@sadiecoles.com Opening hours Tuesday – Saturday 10 – 6pm
