Ugo Rondinone: Sunrise. East.

This summer, grotesque creatures will welcome visitors to the Städel Garden. The Swiss conceptual and installation artist Ugo Rondinone (b. 1964) transforms the prominent hill above the Garden Halls into a strange landscape. For his group of works sunrise. east., Rondinone assigned a head with characteristic, highly reduced facial features to represent each calendar month. Larger than life and cast in shiny silver aluminium, the massive, two-metre-high sculptural heads are reduced to their facial expressions: With mouths agape, they gaze from small eyes, from friendly and naïve to sceptical, from surprised to eerie. They evoke a wide range of associations, from ritual masks and ghosts to the visual language of comics, emoticons, and memes. Visitors to the Städel Garden are invited to come face to face with all twelve creatures—and thus every month of the year—and to experience the various joys, adversities, and emotions of an entire year in fast forward.

Philipp Demandt, Director of the Städel Museum: “The works by the artist Ugo Rondinone touch and speak to everyone. His sculptures have already been shown in cities such as Paris, New York, Rome, and Miami, and even in the Nevada desert. It is a real pleasure to now be able to present his works in the Städel Garden—in the very heart of Frankfurt. The Städel Garden is the museum’s most prominent collection space. Rondinone’s works fit in perfectly, because they underline our approach of making art fully accessible to the public.”

In addition to sculpture, Ugo Rondinone’s oeuvre encompasses various media such as painting, video, and installation. The artist is especially well known for his works in public space, which he has been creating since the 1990s. In the spirit of “art for all,” he aims to reach a wide audience with his characteristic outdoor sculptures. In his poetic and conceptual works, Rondinone explores the contradictions of life, creating a dialogue between artificiality and nature, culture and society, eternity and transience.

Many of Rondinone’s ideas and approaches have proved formative for subsequent generations of artists. While the sculpture of the 2000s is characterised by an explicit artificiality, since 2003 Rondinone has been reflecting on classical materials such as clay and bronze in his group of masks. With an archaic form and a haptic that reveals the work process, he translates cultural and art historical phenomena into the twenty-first century: a unique and meditative visual language that seems to find an echo in current artistic positions.

Ugo Rondinone was born in 1964 in Brunnen, Switzerland. He studied at the University of Applied Arts Vienna before moving to New York in 1997 and continues to live and work there to this day. His works have been the presented in solo exhibitions at, among others, the Storm King Art Center, New York (2023); the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Geneva (2023); the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt (2022); the Tamayo Museum, Mexico City (2022); the Petit Palais, Paris (2022); the Scuola Grande San Giovanni Evangelista di Venezia, Venice (2022); the Belvedere, Vienna (2021); the Berkley Art Museum, Berkeley (2017); the Contemporary Arts Center Cincinnati (2017); the Bass Museum of Art, Miami (2017); the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2016); the MACRO, Rome (2016); the Carré d’Art, Nîmes (2016); the Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2015); the Secession, Vienna (2015); the Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai (2014); the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago (2013); the Whitechapel Gallery, London (2006); and the Centre George-Pompidou, Paris (2003). In 2007, he represented Switzerland at the 52nd Venice Biennale.

Director: Dr Philipp Demandt  
Curator: Svenja Grosser (Deputy Head of the Collection of Contemporary Art) 
Press contact: Pamela Rohde (Head of Press and Online Communication): presse [​at​] staedelmuseum.de / T (+49 69) 605098 170
Press material: newsroom.staedelmuseum.de/en (texts and images for download)