Ugo Rondinone. Sunrise. East.

PRESS RELEASE
UGO RONDINONE. SUNRISE. EAST.
EXTENDED UNTIL 9 JUNE 2024
Städel Garden

This summer, grotesque creatures will welcome visitors to the Städel Garden. The Swiss conceptual and installation artist Ugo Rondinone (b. 1964) transforms the prominent hill above the Garden Halls into a strange landscape. 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, two-metre-high 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 evoke a wide range of associations, from ritual masks and ghosts to 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 to experience the various joys, adversities, and emotions of an entire year in fast forward. In addition to sculpture, Ugo Rondinone’s oeuvre encompasses various media such as painting, video, and installation. The artist is especially well known for his works in public space, which he has been creating since the 1990s. In the spirit of ‘art for all’, he aims to reach a wide audience with his characteristic outdoor sculptures. In his poetic and conceptual works, Rondinone explores the contradictions of life, creating a dialogue between artificiality and nature, culture and society, eternity and transience.

Curator: Svenja Grosser (Deputy Head of the Collection of Contemporary Art, Städel Museum)
Sponsored by: Freunde der Tat – Städelscher Museums-Verein e.V.