2020-07-21
A look at the collection: Ugo Rondinone, Seventeenth of March Nineteen Ninety-Two
The Reinhard Ernst collection includes a work by the contemporary artist Ugo Rondinone with summery shimmering colour gradients. The Swiss artist studied at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna from 1986 to 1990. During this time, he held his first solo exhibitions in Switzerland and Austria.
Rondinone acts as a conceptual, media and installation artist who, among other things, examines the issue of transience and the visualisation of time. The artist’s varied œuvre extends across media as varied as painting, photography or large-scale installations. Rondinone also engages with the visual arts on a linguistic level. In three of the exhibitions he has curated, he examines the relationship between lyric poetry and the visual arts (The Third Mind at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris in 2007, The Spirit Level at the Gladstone Gallery in New York in 2011 and Artists and Poets at the Vienna Secession in 2015).
Seventeenth of March Nineteen Ninety-Two shows concentrically arranged circles of paint in a vibrant colour scheme, which was sprayed on to a rectangular canvas using an airbrush technique. The contours of the colour areas are blurred, so the viewer seems to perceive a heated shimmer. In 1992, Rondinone began his Sun Pictures, which he now creates on a circular painting surface. The work in the Reinhard Ernst Collection – which is represented in large numbers in the colour field painting of the 20th century – is among the early works in this series. This is apparent on the one hand in the title, which shows the date of production in large letters. On the other hand, it can be recognised by the still rectangular shape of the canvas. In formal terms, Rondinone places the Sun Pictures in a dialogue with the works of the 20th century from Op Art and colour field painting. In particular, he refers to the artist Kenneth Noland, for whom chromatic visual composition plays an equally important role.
Ugo Rondinone lives and works in New York.
