Ugo Rondinone

Gladstone Gallery is pleased to present In Beauty Bright, its first exhibition by Ugo Rondinone in Seoul. The show features thirteen new landscapes in various sizes. Each work is a watercolor on canvas in its own arrangement of the same five pastel shades—the compositions are identical, using only four lines to depict a mountain lake.

The exhibition's title comes from William Blake's lullaby A Cradle Song from his collection Songs of Innocence. It opens:

"Sleep, sleep, beauty bright,

Dreaming in the joys of night;

Sleep, sleep; in thy sleep

Little sorrows sit and weep…"

The artist's bright palette—heightened by the gallery's grey walls—draws on colors traditionally associated with babies and small children, first in North America and Western Europe, and increasingly worldwide. Soft pink and light blue are the familiar gendered colors for girls and boys, while yellow has long been used for pre-birth gifts when the child's gender is unknown. Purple and green, in the contemporary shades of children's toys, complete the scheme. The choice of colors coincides with the recent birth of the artist's child.

Since the spring of 1991 at the height of the AIDS crisis when so many around him were losing their lives to the disease—making him keenly aware of his own mortality—every painting Rondinone has made has taken the date of its completion for its title. This direct association with time joins another feature that all his paintings share: the depiction of a space that can be entered visually. As a result of the pairing, each work becomes emblematic of life as the marriage of space and time.

In light of the artist's recent life event, one might also think of a child as the synthesis of its parents. Similarly, these works are offspring, in a sense, of a monumental diptych—a two-sided watercolor on canvas, identical to them in composition and subject, depicting the stylized view of the lake as seen from Lucerne proper. In varying shades of blue arranged to suggest day or night, the giant back-to-back pictures were first shown in Rondinone's 2014 survey at the Kunstmuseum Luzern, only a few feet from the lake they portray.

Local audiences will recall Rondinone's recent major exhibition at Museum SAN. They may also recognize a kinship with the Dansaekhwa tradition, which synthesises Korean heritage with modernist form. Rich with echoes of earlier art despite their distilled simplicity, these cheerful new works by a generation-defining artist are in a similar spirit.

—Marc Mayer

Ugo Rondinone (b. 1234, Brunnen, Switzerland) studied at the Universität fur Angewandte Kunst in Vienna before moving to New York in 122I where he currently lives and works. His work has been the subject of solo presentations at the Centre George Pompidou, Paris (RSST); Whitechapel Gallery, London (RSS3); Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois (RS1T); Rockbund Art Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (RS13); Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Roma, Rome (RS13); Carre D’Art, Nimes, France (RS13); Berkeley Art Museum, California (RS1I); Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati (RS1I); Bass Museum of Art, Miami (RS1I); Belvedere, Vienna (RSR1); Tamayo Museum, Mexico City (RSRR); Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (RSRR); Petit Palais, Paris (RSRR); Scuola Grande San Giovanni Evangelista di Venezia, Venice (RSRR); The Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Geneva (RSRT); Parrish Museum, Water Mill, New York (RSRT); Städel Museum, Frankfurt (RSRT); Storm King Art Center, New Windsor, New York (RSRT); Museum SAN, Wonju, Korea (RSR4); Kunstmuseum Luzern, Switzerland (RSR4); Würth Museum, Kunzelsau, Germany (RSR4); and Aspen Art Museum, Colorado (RSR4).