Lot 11
Ugo Rondinone (Swiss 1964-)
Still Life (Cardboard Leaning On The Wall), 2009
MODERN MADE: Modern & Post-War Art, Design & Studio Ceramics | 695
Auction: 28 October 2022 at 11:00 BST
Description
1/1, initialled and dated 'u. r. / 09', bronze cast, lead and paint
Dimensions
116.7cm x 115.8cm (46in x 45 1/2in)
Provenance
Provenance:
Purchased by the current owner at Basel Art Fair 2010, from Sadie Coles HQ London.
Exhibited:
Ugo Rondinone: Nude, Sadie Coles HQ, London, 2009.
Footnote
"I always say that you don’t have to understand an artwork. You have just to feel it. In my work I use very basic raw symbols, something that everybody can relate to, from a child to an old person, from the East to the West."
Ugo Rondinone
Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone’s Liverpool Mountain currently stands outside Tate Liverpool – a glorious and joyful statement on both the power of colour and the presence art objects can have within the wider world. Whilst its form is minimalist and brutal – part megalith, part Constantin Brancusi’s Eternal Column – the colour is maximal, playful and bright. It is this push and pull between minimalism and the expressive, conceptualism and humour, that defines Rondinone’s work – and is very much in evidence in the present work.
Still Life is, simultaneously, a minimalist sculpture, in the tradition of Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Richard Serra et al. and a ‘found object’, akin to Marcel Duchamp’s urinal or bottle rack. It is also a beautiful, witty reminder that anything can be art, if you approach it with the right mindset. Essential to these various elements working in sync is the quality of the object itself. It has to trick the eye into looking like cardboard (for it to be a kind of Ready-made) and yet it has to have a cool beauty all of its own (to read as a work of Minimalism). This has been achieved by a painstaking process of casting the original card in bronze and then filling the cast with lead (to give it dead-weight) and then painting the surface with absolute flatness, so the only marks on it are created by shadows in real folds. That these folds then take on a painterly quality, a hint of Abstract Expressionist dynamic, is a further layer that Rondinone adds. Placed against a wall it is inevitable that our minds should wander across the lines, their intersections, and start investing them with intention and emotion.
If art’s defining purpose is to make us look again at the world around us, and to imbue it with a sense of wonder, then Rondinone’s Still Life is a perfect example. The everyday – and especially a discarded sheet of card – will never be ordinary again.