Museum SAN presents BURN TO SHINE, a solo exhibition of works by Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone. With over forty works of sculpture, painting, installation, and film featured in the museum’s three main galleries, as well as the Nam June Paik Hall and the outdoor stone garden, BURN TO SHINE offers the most comprehensive presentation of the artist’s oeuvre in Korea to date. In contrast to the broad spectrum of medium and visual language that individual works employ, however, the exhibition, as a whole, gravitates toward themes that remain at the core of Rondinone’ s artistic practice spanning over three decades – the cycle of life, and relationship to nature that fundamentally define our human condition and experience.
Ugo Rondinone grew up as a secondo in central Switzerland. As a gay man, he saw his life limited by the Aids crisis. But he became a world artist. NZZ conducted a big interview with the artist about his life, in which he said: "My self-confidence is like a fairy tale. One day you see yourself as a gilded carriage, the next you realize you're just a pumpkin after all"
Ugo Rondinone has created a screen print of The Sun and a series of 27 of his Mountain sculptures exclusively for the NZZ. Reminiscent of geological formations, these are crafted from stacked stone chunks, arranged in pairs to create abstract compositions. Originating with a monumental installation in Nevada in 2016, Rondinone's mountains have found homes in public spaces globally, as well as smaller interiors. Each stone in the series is painted in a vibrant Day-Glo color, adding to the visual impact of the pieces.
Louisa Gagliardi was in conversation with the Korean auction specialist MinHee Suh on the occasion of the opening of her solo exhibition Hard Feelings at Galerie Eva Presenhuber x Taxa in Seoul.
"Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich, presents the eighth solo exhibition of the artist: bass+ (re)modification, on display until 18 May. In a large white room, a black horizontal line runs across three walls. Dotted above and below, we see a series of rectangular, monochrome MDF panels. These vary in size and palette – on one end we witness a vibrant neon green, on the other, a quiet, slim blue. There’s a sense of coolness and play at hand, invoked by geometric shapes that are constantly in conversation with each other. We feel an energy bounce off each board, reflecting and reverberating across the gallery in a way that suggests lyricality. You’d be forgiven for thinking that these panels represent bars of sound, as if to emulate a musical software application."
While in Paris for the installation of his Suddenly This Overview presented at the Bourse de Commerce, Peter Fischli gave an interview about this vast ensemble of clay sculptures conceived with David Weiss between 1981 and 2021.
Tschabalala Self’s work has been selected for the 2026 Fourth Plinth commission. The Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square is one of the most important art commissions worldwide, putting new work by internationally renowned artists into the heart of London. Self’s sculpture, titled Lady in Blue, pays homage to a contemporary woman, who could be one of many Londoners walking through Trafalgar Square. Made of bronze, she will reference the square’s existing monuments, but will be patinated with Lapis Lazuli, a refined blue pigment in use since antiquity.
Find out more about the Fourth Plinth Commission here.
Ocula spoke to Louisa Gagliardi about her unconventional painting methods and her upcoming show at Galerie Eva Presenhuber x Taxa, Seoul. Her work often explores feelings of awkwardness and alienation, earning her the nickname Digital Dali. Oculat states: "Gagliardi is one of very few artists who has found representation at a leading gallery for her digital paintings, which she augments with ink and nail polish."
Spanning Fruitmarket's Exhibition Galleries and Warehouse, the exhibition starts with an architectural installation showcasing wall-based works, transitions to a room displaying Martin Boyce’s history with Jan and Joël Martel’s 1925 concrete ‘trees’, and reimagines Fruitmarket’s Upper Gallery with an atmospheric blend of works. In the Warehouse, sculptures are presented in unconventional ways, questioning notions of storage and memory. This comprehensive showcase, spanning from 1992 to the present, offers a rare opportunity to contemplate the artistic essence and sculptural language of one of the UK’s foremost artists.
CC Strombeek presents the first institutional exhibition of Swiss artist Louisa Gagliardi. Her practice mainly revolves around alienation, and dislocation as essential features of our current, global existence. Gagliardi’s strongly pronounced, figurative paintings form not only technically, but also visually a complex game denoting delirium or delusion. For this show, the artist will conceive a new series of paintings and sculptures within a maze-like scenography. Deep Breaths builds upon her ongoing interest in the liminal space. In our highly technological and hyper connected world the borders between reality and fiction are becoming more and more blurry. We get tricked into thinking that our flesh self and virtual self might become one.
Apropos Hodler - Current Perspectives on an Icon, a new exhibition at the Kunsthaus Zürich, offers a deep dive into the enduring legacy of Hodler's art, examining its contemporary relevance through four key themes: landscapes, corporeality, belonging, and enigma/transcendence. Among the artworks, Ugo Rondinone's mesmerizing glass horses, forged from fire into cast glass, represent the earth through the animal's physicality. They are named after the oceans and captivate viewers with their fusion of themes surrounding natural elements, exploration, and romance.
Brooklyn-based Austin Eddy’s paintings call on the viewer to create their own stories out of the ones he proposes. He might use autobiographical events and abstract them to birds, but never imposes his own interpretation. His birds are more form than animal: they are stand-ins for the very human desire for personal freedom, framed by its equally strong wish for stability and structure. As his work toes the line between figurative and abstract, it recalls the cubist forms of the 20th century, while being firmly anchored in Austin’s present.
"The title of Steven Shearer’s exhibition “Sleep, Death’s Own Brother” reverberates from the almost seven-meter-wide wall piece Sleep II, 2015, a collage of hundreds of small photos depicting slumbering individuals. Some seem to be peacefully resting, while others appear lifeless, resembling corpses. This lurking presence of death pervades the entire exhibition, evident in thirty-seven small drawings and thirteen prominent paintings like The Sickly Fauve, 2014, which shows a pale androgynous figure whose dark under-eye circles suggest they haven’t seen sunlight for weeks."
The Schirn Kunsthalle presents THE CULTURE, an exhibition commemorating the 50th anniversary of Hip Hop. Originating in the Bronx during the 1970s, Hip Hop emerged as a powerful platform for cultural expression and critique. In collaboration with the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Saint Louis Art Museum, this exhibition sheds light on Hip Hop's profound global influence spanning music, fashion, technology, and the arts over the past five decades. Showcasing over 100 works by acclaimed artists like Adam Pendleton and Tschabalala Self, the exhibition delves into themes such as identity, racism, appropriation, and empowerment.
Madeleine Pollard from Elephant Magazine reported on Sofia Mitsola's recent gallery show: "When it came to her latest body of work, Villa Venus: An Organised Dream, which recently showed at Zurich’s Galerie Eva Presenhuber, her focus expanded from the bodies themselves to their surroundings. “I’d been concentrating on my characters for some years, so then I was trying to imagine a place to put them. Where do they sprout from? Where do they live?” she explains. “In 2022, I was on the Greek island of Paros in the Cyclades and it got me thinking about fantastical places. I wanted to create an island of my own.”"
The Bourse de Commerce exhibis a portion of Peter Fischli David Weiss's Suddenly this Overview (1981-2012) installation. This clay-based work humorously explores human history through hand-modeled sculptures, accompanied by the film The Least Resistance (1981). The duo's first sculptural epic utilizes raw clay to create 76 figurines with captions serving as punchlines, offering a playful and thought-provoking blend of absurdity and universality. In the Auditorium, the experimental film The Way Things Go (1987) is screened.
Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art featuring work by Tschabalala Self is on view at London’s Barbican Gallery, where it can be seen through May 26, 2024. The major exhibition shines a light on 50 artists from the 1960s to today who have explored the transformative and subversive potential of textiles, harnessing the medium to ask charged questions about power: who holds it, and how can it be challenged and reclaimed?
The Spotlight series includes a new or never-before-exhibited artwork paired with a commissioned piece of writing, creating focused and thoughtful conversations between the visual arts and authors, critics, poets, scholars, and beyond. In this iteration, the Spotlight features Tschabalala Self’s Hear No, 2023, presented in dialogue with Faith Ringgold’s fabric work Coming to Jones Road Part 2 #2: We Here Aunt Emmy Got Us Now, 2010. A text by the artist accompanies the presentation.
Expansive in their collecting habits, the Deans, both born and raised in New York, champion a philosophy of “artists supporting artists.” The first major exhibition of the Dean Collection, Giants showcases a focused selection from the couple’s world-class holdings, including a work by Tschabalala Self. The Brooklyn Museum’s presentation spotlights works by Black diasporic artists, part of our ongoing efforts to expand the art-historical narrative.
Wyatt Kahn presents a new solo exhibition titled Fantasmas at Museo Anahuacalli Mexico City from February 6 through May 19, 2024. The show includes over twenty sculptural paintings that move between painting and sculpture, between the abstract and the figurative, and between the flat and the three-dimensional. With more than thirty works in total and spanning thirteen years of Kahn’s career, the exhibition is his largest and most diverse to date, including works in bronze, lead, canvas, and stuffed animals and some of his first unprimed multi-panel works from 2011.
The Sydney AIDS Memorial, a poignant bluestone and stainless steel sculpture titled 'the remembered‘ (2018) by Ugo Rondinone, serves as a solemn tribute to those lives lost to HIV/AIDS.
Jerry Saltz reviewed Tschabalala Self's exhibition Bodega Run at the Swiss Institute in New York: "Were the dusty bodegas of old superior to the anonymous, flattened spaces where many of us now buy our food? Yes and no. Self’s pop-up show was a milestone in a project that testifies that, especially in this city, there’s no such thing as a love that’s uncomplicated."
The exhibition title Cry Me a River cites a song that has been interpreted by many singers, including Ella Fitzgerald and Justin Timberlake. In the case of Ugo Rondinone, “river” refers to the River Reuss, which flows out of the Lake Lucerne, in front of the Kunstmuseum Luzern. Inside the museum it seems as if it is snowing, a couple of fish flit by. Ugo Rondinone’s reference to the legendary Inner-Swiss Inwardness and its particular leaning towards materials is no coincidence. The artist stages his cultural origins lovingly and with great exhilaration. A nice example of this are his “Stonefigures”, larger-than-life stone men that continue the tradition of the helpful signposts in the mountains.
Fondazione Prada presents the installation Suddenly This Overview (1981-2012) by Peter Fischli David Weiss at the Torre’s fifth floor as part of the exhibition project Atlas. This work’s version combines 157 medium- and small-scale raw clay sculptures arranged on plinths of different heights, representing the world through a seemingly arbitrary selection of events, objects, phrases, and historical or invented notions.
Heinz Schütz interviewed Matthew Angelo Harrison for KUNSTFORUM International, stating: "The encapsulation of traditional African sculptures plays a central role in Matthew Angelo Harrison's work. Transparent, futuristic-looking plastic boxes preserve what has been encapsulated. With their purist minimalist aesthetics, they act like "coolers" that contain and dim down the once cultic-magical and highly expressive in a modernist way. What began as an exploration of Harrison's African-American roots points beyond and becomes a commentary on the present."
Around the Way features multi-material paintings and sculptures by Tschabalala Self, whose works will together form colourful spatial displays in EMMA’s concrete-dominated exhibition space. Self’s art often deals with the intersections of race and gender. The artist draws from her personal experiences as a Black American woman. She depicts bodies that are both exalted and objectified in Western imagery and art history. Through repetition, deconstruction and distortion of this imagery, she creates a new kind of narrative about the Black body.
For his group of works Sunrise. East, Rondinone assigned a head with characteristic, highly reduced facial features to represent each calendar month. Larger than life and cast in shiny silver aluminium, the massive sculptural heads are reduced to their facial expressions: With mouths agape, they gaze from small eyes, from friendly and naïve to sceptical, from surprised to eerie. They trigger the most diverse associations, evoking ritual masks and ghosts, as well as the visual language of comics, emoticons, and memes. Visitors to the Städel Garden are invited to come face-to-face with all twelve creatures – and thus every month of the year – and experience the various joys, adversities, and emotions of an entire year in fast forward.