Exhibition Ugo Rondinone shows nature installations at the Lucerne Art Museum
Art Museum Director Fanni Fetzer in the "thank you silence" room, in which Ugo Rondinone takes up the magical atmosphere of snowfall. In the background, a neon yellow flash from the installation "lightning".
Image: Keystone
In the installation "primal", a visitor makes his way through the miniature horses cast in bronze.
Image: Keystone
The installation "stone figures" is reminiscent of archaic human representations.
Image: Keystone
Art Museum Director Fanni Fetzer in the "thank you silence" room, in which Ugo Rondinone takes up the magical atmosphere of snowfall. In the background, a neon yellow flash from the installation "lightning".
Image: Keystone
In the installation "primal", a visitor makes his way through the miniature horses cast in bronze.
Image: Keystone
The installation "stone figures" is reminiscent of archaic human representations.
Image: Keystone
The Lucerne Museum of Art is showing works by Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone. The room-filling installations that he has created over the last 30 years take up themes from nature in an easily accessible way.
05.07.2024, 14:35
SDA
The art of 59-year-old Rondinone is not aloof. He designed one of the ten exhibition rooms in the Lucerne Art Museum with hundreds of sun drawings made by children. The other rooms of the "Cry Me a River" exhibition (-20.10.2024) also feature motifs that are simple and appeal to everyone.
In the first room, Rondinone placed lightning bolts - a theme that is hardly suitable for sculpture, as Fanni Fetzer, director of the art museum, explained during a tour on Friday. Rondinone solved the problem in a simple but captivating way. He made bronze casts of branches from a tree that was struck by lightning in his garden on Long Island and colored them neon yellow.
It rains and snows
In another room, Rondinone recreated another weather phenomenon, namely rain. He also stretched chains. In another room, he made paper snow trickle down. What the weather installations have in common is that they do not depict nature, but stimulate the viewer's imagination.
Rondinone populated three rooms with birds, fish and miniature horses made of bronze. They represent the elements of air, water and earth. The figures appear timeless and could have come from an archaeological excavation, according to the exhibition documents.
The same applies to five large cairns. They appear sublime, but never threatening. Rondinone exhibited even larger figures of this kind at Rockefeller Plaza in New York in 2013, while a cairn stands in a traffic circle in Andermatt UR.
Rondinone grew up in Brunnen SZ as the child of Italian immigrants and later moved to New York. For the exhibition in May, he painted a day and night picture of Lake Lucerne as seen from Brunnen using five shades of blue. The paintings stand back-to-back in the middle of the room as an installation and together encompass an entire day.
