Milan,
Born in 1964 in the Swiss city of Brunnen and formed in art at the Hoschshule Fur Angewandte Kunste in Vienna, Ugo Rondinone collaborated with Herman Nitsch before reaching recognition for his individual work, in the nineties, by the hand of projects that refer to the most elementary mechanisms of human communication from humor and patetism, far from the usual intellectualism in the creation post -conceptualist of that same stage.
It was then, in 1998, when he decided to settle in New York, where Rondinone has worked in the last quarter of a century as an artist (in drawings, paintings, facilities, sculptures, performances and videos) and as a commissioner, collector and poet. In these multiform creations this author proposes, in the thematic, ironic reflections around the nature of man, while his aesthetics derives from the collusion of features of very different sculptural and pictorial traditions.
His first institutional sample in Milan can already be visited in the Galleria d’Ar modern art. GAM: It is called “Terrone”, the Caroline Corbetta police station, and in it, as in the set of its proposals, the references to the history of art are intertwined with their personal experiences and with claims of the power of nature, which with its infinite cycles, stations and exchanges has not stopped governing us all.
Most of these works are crossed by three concepts (trees, objects and naked) and all of them allude to the land itself and the links of the human being with their environment, hence rural life has a lot of weight in their work. One of the epiphanies that have marked the journey of Rondinone was his discovery of the great canvas Il Quarto Stato, of Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo, which is part of the funds of the Museum of the Milanés novelty and that the artist knew in his childhood, because his father comes from Matera. Not far, in Basilicata, he acquired an olive grove in 2003; From that renewed experience in the countryside, and of agricultural wisdom inherited from his family, he has taken other vital energies for his own artistic research.
In the GAM three monumental trees created between 2011 and 2024 welcome visitors: they take the names of Cold Luna, Spring Moon and Summer moon And, in their whiteness, they interwoven their branches on the visitor. Inside the rooms, however, it will be The great alphabet of my mothers and my parents (2024) The one that transmits us the line of thought of the artist, as an echo of the intrahistory of the composition of Pordeza da Volpedo, a very painful work now in this exhibition, the result of a difficult process and with several previous versions, in which the workers who walk were portrayed with naked hands, with the exception of a mother who takes in his arms to her newborn son.
It is Rondinone, more than a century later, who returns their tools, which are nothing but those of the farmers of Matera, many emigrated in the twenties to the United States: since that parents alphabet Save nobility, the Swiss pays tribute, covering ancient workshops, full of centenary knowledge and oxidized for work and time, with the gold that finally belongs to them, emphasizing their value.
The exhibition is closed by dialogue Rondinone with the sculptures of Medardo Rosso and with neoclassical pieces. We will contemplate wax and land figures dated since 2011, the calls Terroniin which this land is claimed as a mother who gives food and as art material, subverting the derogatory nature of this epithet, Terroniwhich was granted to those in southern Italy lived in the countryside in the past.
Although human beings represent, these figures transcend genres and geographies to embody almost all the edges of art history (sculpture, still life, nude and landscape). And to reinforce the idea that their bodies commented on all the races of the world, the mud from which they are made comes from the seven continents: Rondinone insists that on earth we are born, from it we sustain ourselves and we are heading.
Ugo Rondinone. “Terrone”
Galleria d´Arte Modern Milano. GAM
Via Palestro 16
Milan
From April 2 to July 6, 2025
