Ugo Rondinone

PRIMORDIAL

17 mai - 28 sept. 2025

Skulptur i Pilane

In summer 2025, Pilane will host Primordial, a solo exhibition of the New York-based Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone. It features five monumental stone sculptures with individual titles: the dedicated, the eloquent, the youthful, the angelic, and the modern, all made in 2024. The presentation also includes the bronze sculpture the sun (2022).


 

Like visitors from the primordial past, these behemoths stand nearly five metres tall along the pathway through the Pilane Sculpture Park. Seemingly similar, these giants each have their distinct personalities, as their names suggest.

Ugo Rondinone works in stone in the most archetypical way. He refrains from classical figure modelling and trusts the clarity of archaic forms. At first glance, his imagery is rough-hewn and unsentimental. Gradually, however, the truculent material reveals an astounding sensitivity and beauty, in the volumes that Rondinone chisels out of them. Some parts absorb light, while others reflect it. The veins and natural colouring of the stone surfaces resemble skin tones on these colossuses.

Ugo Rondinone’s mighty figures combine the robust with the simple, and the jagged with the fragile. Their presence in the verdure and crags near the ancient burial site is so natural that they seem like a homecoming rather than a visit.