Ugo Rondinone

If one refers to the official index of Ugo Rondinone's works, his corpus originates with a series of sculptures of flowers in plaster and Vaseline dated 1988. The artist commonly starts his trajectory, however, with landscapes drawn in India ink, in a style reminiscent of both seventeenth-century Dutch art and German Romanticism. Based on preparatory drawings he made during country walks outside of Vienna, these nostalgic landscapes introduced a number of elements that can also be found in his later works: a protocol leading him to create artworks based on handmade “studies” that, via several “transports” or transfers potentially incorporating steps delegated to independent contractors, result in another image; an attraction to variations on a single theme; the use of “cycles” and “systems,” in particular those conveyed by nomenclature in the titles he attributes to his works; and last, the creation of work pertaining to his autobiography. Those early landscapes were, in fact, made in response to loss, the artist’s partner, Manfred Kirchner, having died of AIDS in 1988. “In the midst of the AIDS crisis,” Rondinone recalls, “I turned away from my grief and found a spiritual guard rail in nature, a place for comfort, regeneration and inspiration. In nature, you enter a space where the sacred and the profane, the mystical and the secular vibrate against one another.”[1] The first landscape was painted on February 23, 1989. Rondinone would show three others, produced in March, June and October respectively, in an exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Luzern in Switzerland that same year, in which his approach to presentation might be considered the matrix of his exhibitions to come.[14]

One cannot dissociate Rondinone’s exhibitions from his works, which as a result evolve in forms of presentation that are ceaselessly reinvented by the artist. As with the way in which his works are subject to variations, he modifies the way their “content” and “container” are shown from one exhibition to the next. These modifications can be infinitesimal or can, on the contrary, involve profound changes. They can open up new perspectives or displace them. And they can involve the elaboration of a “scenario” so that for each presentation, the work or works can be seen as if never shown before. Exhibitions are also a way for the artist to play on vectors that are complementary, if not contradictory; a work shown by Rondinone in a specific context is often juxtaposed with “opposite” proposals. This can be seen with his landscapes. In the 1989 exhibition, his India ink drawings were arranged in a “homogeneous” manner, while a second exhibition, held in the same location a year later and devoted to his 1990 landscapes, presented them next to a temporary wall made of wooden slats painted in white. An extension of the gallery entrance, this wall isolated the exhibition system from the space’s facade and dissociated it from its “daily life,” creating a sort of corridor whose confined quality—conducive to spiritual and introspective contemplation—offered a powerful contrast with the openness to the world and nature suggested by the landscapes. The first “wall” imagined by Rondinone, it permitted him to invite a new “protagonist” or “figure” into a work for which the exhibition space would be the preferred stage and setting.

After his first exhibition at the Galerie Walcheturm in Zurich in 1991, in which he perpetuated the “narrative” of the Kunstmuseum Luzern and emphasized the “duality” formed by landscapes open to the world and a space cut off from it, in 1992, Rondinone unveiled a family of works that was resolutely other—his sun paintings. Related in their own way to spiritual withdrawal and “mindless activity,” these paintings are considered by the artist as a continuation of the landscapes, except, of course, for the fact that they replace the “figurative” drawings in black and white with a chromatic spectrum that is as iridescent and hypnotic as it is “abstract.” Distant. A sort of diurnal counterpart to the nocturnal scenes, reflecting once again the law of contrasts that is so prominent in Rondinone’s work.

Seven Magic Mountains, commissioned, produced and financed by the Art Production Fund (APF) and the Nevada Museum of Art, followed Rondinone's work Human Nature, a Public Art Fund project of monumental, stone stick-figures arranged in the highly man-made environment of Rockefeller Center in Manhattan—and depicts the opposite: highly artificial neon totems set in the natural environment.[1]

The piece consists of 33 limestone boulders, each weighing 10 to 25 tons, arranged in seven towers 30 to 35 feet tall[15]—secured by a solid backbone, with each stone painted a bright, fluorescent color.[1] Approximately five years in the making, the work is located on the far southern end of Las Vegas Boulevard,[16] 10 miles south of the intersection of Las Vegas Boulevard and St. Rose Parkway in Henderson, Nevada, near Dry Jean Lake, with a backdrop of the McCullough Mountains.[17] It is located at 35°50′18.19″N 115°16′15.304″W.

The sculpture was organized by the Nevada Museum of Art[1] and runs from May 11, 2016 to December 31, 2018[16]—having originally been scheduled for two years and extended through the end of 2018.[15] Near the end of 2018, the sculpture was again rescheduled to extend three more years. The original installation opened following a two-day inaugural event.[18]

The work is situated on three acres (1.2 ha) of federally owned land[17] under the jurisdiction of the Bureau of Land Management.[17] Resolving federal, state, and local regulations consumed nearly 20% of the project’s budget[17] and permitting took approximately three years.[17] Ultimately, the Bureau of Land Management granted a “site” type right-of-way permit—typically a 30-year permit authorizing projects such as communication towers—for three years.[17] Seven Magic Mountains was privately funded and cost approximately $3.5 million.[15]

A special law reduces the producers’ and the artist’s liability if a member of the viewing public "does something stupid" (e.g., climbing and falling).[1] The law, Seven Magic Mountains, NRS 41.517, is the only public-art carve-out in the country.[17] Signs around the sculpture warn viewers of potential dangers.[1]

The Reno Gazette-Journal estimated that more than two million people have taken photographs at the sculpture for Instagram. Vogue used the installation in a photo shoot in April 2017.[15] It is one of the largest land-based art installations in the United States since the early 1990s.[16]

A similar sculpture, the 35 ft Miami Mountain, built in 2015, is located outside The Bass Art Museum in Collins Park, Miami Beach, Fl, as of December 2021.[19]