Ugo Rondinone: Vocabulary of Solitude

Next spring Ugo Rondinone (b. 1964, Switzerland, lives and works in New York) will fill the Bodon Galleries at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen with an immense installation comprising existing and new works from his colour spectrum series, half mandalas, windows and thousands of rainbow drawings. 45 lifelike sculptures of clowns will form the centrepiece of Ugo Rondinone: Vocabulary of Solitude, the artist’s first solo exhibition in the Netherlands.

Rondinone gives everyday motifs and images a poetic dimension by isolating or enlarging them. On the floor of the 1500-square-metre Bodon Galleries, visitors will move between life-size clown figures, each engaged in a different everyday activity: sleeping, daydreaming, waking up, sitting, running, etc. In this installation, the clown—at the centre of everything and in the middle of nothing—is the personification of unhappiness. Rondinone lets his huge installations speak for themselves. An artwork, he says, is successful if the viewer doesn’t have to think and is led naturally in a particular direction: “Good art revolutionises your whole being. It is something that stops you, or slows you down.”

The exhibition, which opens during Art Rotterdam Week (February 10–14, 2016), is an international partnership and will travel to several other museums after its showing in Rotterdam.

Ugo Rondinone
From poetic installations in public spaces to life-size drawings, Ugo Rondinone’s work balances on the edge of euphoria and depression. He is one of the world’s leading visual artists. He represented Switzerland at the Venice Biennale in 2007 and has had major solo exhibitions at the Pompidou Centre, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, the Kunsthalle Wien and Palais Tokyo. 

Contemporary art in Boijmans
In the spring of 2016, contemporary art takes centre stage at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen with Ugo Rondinone, the major exhibition Project Rotterdam, and the 8th edition of Sensory Spaces. The museum has a long tradition of experimental exhibitions of work by leading international contemporary artists. At the museum’s invitation, Ugo Rondinone follows in the footsteps of Fischli & Weiss (2003/2004), Urs Fischer (2006), Yayoi Kusama (2008), Pipilotti Rist (2009), Olafur Eliasson (2005, 2010), Carsten Höller (2010), Paul Noble (2014) and many others.

Also on show: Project Rotterdam
After ten years, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen devotes another survey to artists and designers working in Rotterdam. The exhibition Project Rotterdam is part of “Rotterdam Celebrates the City!” and opens on February 13, 2016 during Art Rotterdam Week. Throughout the spring, the museum will fill a growing number of galleries with new and existing works by more than 15 young artists and designers, including Koen Taselaar, Melle Smets, Christien Meindertsma and Weronika Zielinska.