Ugo Rondinone: LIFE TIME

The Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt is dedicating a first major survey exhibition in Germany to Ugo Rondinone (b. 1964). LIFE TIME presents key paintings, sculptures, and video works by the Swiss artist, who is one of the internationally best-known of his generation. In his works, he adds a poetic dimension to everyday things and phenomena. A tree, a clock, the sun or a rainbow—by means of repetition, isolation or reduction, he positions them in new contexts in his typically rather minimalistically arranged spaces, creating atmospheric ambiences. The exhibition combines essential themes that have shaped Ugo Rondinone’s work for the past 30 years: time and transience, day and night, reality and fiction, nature and culture.

Dr. Philipp Demandt, director of the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, comments on the exhibition: “Following Ugo Rondinone’s work for many years with great enthusiasm, I am all the more delighted that the artist has accepted our invitation to present his first major survey exhibition in Germany at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt. His works have been exhibited all over the world, and his luminous rainbows from New York, Paris, and Shanghai are well known. Now one of these great works shines above the Schirn in Frankfurt. Although Rondinone is one of the best-known artists of his generation, his work, underpinned by a peculiar poetry and grounded in a subjective, quasi-universal phenomenology, invariably remains both fascinating and poignant.”

Specifically for the Schirn, Rondinone groups around 80 of his works into new constellations and sequences, creating a unique installation that spreads along the gallery, into the Rotunda, and onto the roof. The main part of the exhibition is divided into five sections that extend across the entire gallery of the Schirn. A narrative unfolds that follows the transition from night to day, from darkness to light. In response to the location, the artist developed curved standing landscape with entry door (2022), one of his monumental landscape sculptures made of soil. Further, thousands of pictures of the moon, drawn by children especially for the exhibition, are presented under the title your age and my age and the age of the moon (2014–ongoing)—a meditation on the universe.

Matthias Ulrich, curator of the exhibition, remarks on the artist: “Shaped by biographical experiences such as his first partner’s untimely death from AIDS, Ugo Rondinone’s works address existential themes. A fundamental melancholic mood in terms of a universal worldview is found in each of his works. Both the serially applied motif and the structural plan that is reflected in the title, for example, are part of this concept. In addition, there are recurring art-historical references, the exploration of a variety of media, and a participatory element. It is on the basis of these diverse levels within his art that viewers are inevitably drawn into the maelstrom of Rondinone’s cosmos.”

The exhibition Ugo Rondinone: LIFE TIME is supported by Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia. The children’s project “Schirn Stars” is supported by the Verein der Freunde der Schirn Kunsthalle e.V.

A catalog edited by Matthias Ulrich has been published in a bilingual edition with a preface by Dr. Philipp Demandt and contributions by Dominic Eichler, Brigitte Franzen, and Matthias Ulrich.

Director: Dr. Philipp Demandt
Curator: Matthias Ulrich, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt 
Press contact: Johanna Pulz (Head of Press/Public Relations), presse@schirn.de / T +49 (0) 69 29 98 82 148
Press material: schirn.de/en/newsroom