Contained horizons

Ugo Rondinone
a sky . a sea . distant mountains . horses . spring .
Sadie Coles, London, UK
12 April – 22 May 2021

The last art exhibition I saw that truly resonated with me was Ugo Rondinone’s show at Sadie Coles this spring. It’s been over two months since I visited, but I hope you find his works as visually and conceptually compelling as I did.

Ugo Rondinone (b. 1964) is a Swiss-born, New York–based mixed-media artist. He studied at the Hochschule für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna (1986–1990), and has exhibited extensively on an international scale. He is particularly known for his temporary, large-scale land art sculptures such as Seven Magic Mountains (2016–2021), featuring seven fluorescently painted, car-sized stones stacked 32 feet (9.8 m) high.

For the exhibition at Sadie Coles, Rondinone presented a new, two-dimensional interpretation of Seven Magic Mountains at Davies Street. Each shaped canvas represented a painted rock stacked atop another, arranged vertically, as you can see below.

I appreciated the reinvention of the totem in these paintings, but the works that most captivated me were at Kingly Street, Sadie Coles’ main venue. Here, Rondinone displayed fifteen horses cast in blue glass. The sculptures, bisected horizontally, suggested a seascape or landscape contained within the contours of a body, creating a microcosmic world while inverting the traditional formula of a body within a landscape. By repeating the concept across fifteen foal-sized forms, he also created a landscape of repeated shapes, subtly closing the conceptual circle.

The horse sculptures embody Ugo Rondinone’s exploration of space, time, and nature—a recurring motif in his work. Each piece evokes the four classical elements: water, air, earth (connoted by the horse’s body), and fire, crystallized in the substance of fired glass.

Finally, at the back of the gallery, in a smaller room, a large canvas depicted the conjunction of sea and sky, with the sun poised beyond a horizontal line. Echoing earlier works, Rondinone combined horizontal lines with concentric circle suns, framing a mental space I dared to enter in order to take the photographs below. I hope you enjoy experiencing these works and my interaction with them as The Art Blueberry.

Photos taken at Davies Street (Sadie Coles) below.