In its new exhibition, the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt is entirely dedicated to the works of Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone (*1964). "LIFE TIME" features central paintings, sculptures, and video works by Rondinone, who is internationally one of the best known of his generation. In his works he gives 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 places them in a new context in his characteristic, always minimalist spaces and creates atmospheric mood images. Especially for the Schirn, he groups around 80 of his works into new constellations and sequences, thus creating a unique installation that extends along the entire length of the gallery, into the rotunda, and onto the roof. Site-specific, the artist developed curved standing landscape with entry door (2022), one of his monumental landscape sculptures made of earth. Also created especially for the exhibition, among other things, are thousands of moon images drawn by children, presented under the title your age and my age and the age of the moon (2014-ongoing) - a meditation on the universe.
The exhibition "LIFE TIME" combines essential themes that have characterized Ugo Rondinone's work for 30 years: Time and transience, day and night, reality and fiction, nature and culture. Central to the work of the conceptual and installation artist are the serial principle and the transmedia variation of motifs. Artworks emerge from artworks, are each part of a series, and form cross-work relationships in Rondinone's artistic system. His material observations connect the subjective with the universal and create a sensual-aesthetic bridge to things not made by man. Again and again, Rondinone draws on the iconography of Romanticism in his works, weaving it into a dense web of art history, literature, and pop culture. The starting point of his multimedia oeuvre is the transformation of the outside world into a subjective, emotional inner world. He designs experiential spaces in which space and time disappear in the individual rhythm of perception and the viewers themselves become part of the installations and their immersive facility.
The exhibition, which in addition to the main section in the Schirn Gallery also includes the roof as well as the exterior and interior of the Rotunda, is also accompanied by a comprehensive catalog, with contributions by Dominic Eichler, Brigitte Franzen, and Matthias Ulrich, as well as a foreword by Philipp Demandt, director of the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt.
