Ugo Rondinone
thank you silence
June 27–October 6, 2013
Ilse D’Hollander
June 27–October 20, 2013
Opening: Wednesday June 26, 2013, 7pm
M – Museum Leuven
L. Vanderkelenstraat 28
3000 Leuven, Belgium
As from June 27, M – Museum Leuven presents two new solo exhibitions: Ugo Rondinone and Ilse D’Hollander.
For over twenty years Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone (b. 1964, Brunnen) has been developing an oeuvre in a variety of media, from painting, graphic design, sculpture and photography to video and audio. His work is often based on themes and motifs from our everyday environment that acquire a poetic dimension by being isolated, expanded or given a specific material treatment. With respect to their form, his installations contain diverse references to the history of art and popular culture.
For the first time in Belgium, the thank you silence exhibition at M – Museum Leuven brings together five groups of works created by Ugo Rondinone in the last three years. These groups of works relate to the artist’s interest in nature and mankind. The bronze sculptures titled primitive are a series of hand-moulded birds named after natural phenomena. Clocks made of stained-glass introduce the notion of time into the exhibition. thank you silence also features the nude series of hyper-realistic, introverted figures cast in a mixture of wax and earth pigments. Also on show is a brand-new series of four monumental soil landscapes, each of which is experienced from a different perspective: hanging landscape, standing landscape, angled landscape and leaning landscape. Specially for the exhibition, Ugo Rondinone also created another new work titled your age and my age and the age of the sun. This required the collaboration of children from the city of Leuven, who produced over 300 drawings of the sun, which are presented in a concrete box in the upstairs gallery at M. Finally, the exhibition includes a number of date paintings and the work thank you silence, which lends its name to the show. Through the various groups of works on display, Ugo Rondinone constructs a carefully considered transition from nature to man and introduces links between abstract ideas associated with them.
Ugo Rondinone lives and works in New York. His work has been exhibited globally. He represented Switzerland at the 52nd Venice Biennale (2007) and was also the curator of the exhibitions The Third Mind at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2007) and The Spirit Level at Gladstone Gallery in New York (2012). More recently, he has had solo exhibitions at the Aargauer Kunsthaus (2010), the M.U.S.A.C. in León (2011) and the Rockefeller Plaza in New York (2013). The work of Ugo Rondinone is represented by Galerie Eva Presenhuber (Zürich), Barbara Gladstone Gallery (New York – Brussels), Galerie Almine Rech (Paris – Brussels), Sadie Coles HQ (London) and Esther Schipper (Berlin).
The paintings of Ilse D’Hollander (1968–1997, Sint-Niklaas) resulted from a personal search for the medium of painting. Via meticulous observation of her immediate environment, D’Hollander created compositions of colored surfaces and lines, vibrating forms and transparent overpainting. Visual elements from the landscape, such as a branch, house, or road, are transformed into a more abstract visual language that vacillates between the recognizable, suggestive, determined and more poetic.
Some of her works may be linked to painters like Paul Cézanne, René Daniels or Raoul De Keyser. In only a brief period, between 1989 and 1997, Ilse D’Hollander created an extensive oeuvre of paintings and drawings. Since her sudden death, her work has rarely been exhibited. With about forty drawings and paintings, M is now presenting a broader view of her multifaceted career. A monograph discussing her life and works will be published to accompany the exhibition.
Curator: Eva Wittocx
Press contact: Annelies Evens, annelies.evens [at] leuven.be / T +32 (0)16 27 29 36
More information on our contemporary program? Send a mail to m [at] leuven.be to register.
M has the support of the City of Leuven, Province Flemish-Brabant and the Flemish Community.
The Ugo Rondinone exhibition is supported by Pro Helvetia.
