Ugo Rondinone: Becoming Soil

For this exhibition, Ugo Rondinone turns the Carré d’Art space into a vast landscape associating the large paintings of starry nights and the monumental landscapes done in Indian ink or large blue skies. You find his sculptures of birds ("primitive"), horses ("primal") and fish ("primordial"), modeled and then cast in bronze. All coming in different shapes and sizes, they poetically correspondence with natural phenomena or elements such as snow, dust or sunshine.

Nature is central to the show through the presence of both the animals and all the landscapes. We again find ideas of the cycle, the sublime and immanence, along with an inquiry into man’s place in the universe, his questionings when faced with vertiginous infinity and the beauty of natural phenomena—its romantic view might recall Gérard de Nerval, Novalis, Leopardi and a host of other romantic poets. These figures are all references in the history of art and more broadly in our visual culture.

The exhibition reveals the artist’s attachment to what may be termed the “classical” media, namely painting, drawing and sculpture. In his exhibitions Ugo Rondinone creates a very peculiar relationship with time and space for the viewer. The show becomes scenery for both the mind and the senses and in which time stands still. The tone of the black and white set may come as a surprise to anyone familiar with his taste for colour, and there is a return to colour at one point in the exhibition.

Ugo Rondinone has curates exhibitions for the Palais de Tokyo with The Third Mind in 2007 and I Love John Giorno in 2015. He presented Sunrise East in the Tuileries gardens as part of the Festival d’Automne in 2009. The Carré d’Art exhibition is his first major project in France after the shows at the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai and the Art Institute of Chicago.

With the support of: Pro Helvetia; Esther Schipper, Berlin; Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich; Gladstone Gallery, New York & Brussels; Sadie Coles HQ, London