View of “Ugo Rondinone,” 2015. When Ugo Rondinone reluctantly gave his first public lecture in New York at the New School in 2013, it consisted of an extraordinarily literal walk-through of a retrospective exhibition that had been held at the Aargauer Kunsthaus in Switzerland three years before: “I pass the ten bistro tables of the ...

The trippy feeling that permeates much of Rondinone’s output also characterizes the work of his compatriot Pipilotti Rist, but whereas she tends to throw everything together, Rondinone compartmentalizes—a strangely analytical approach to dreaminess.

2016年5月17日 · Ugo Rondinone’s Seven Magic Mountains. Looking more like a country-and-western star than a museum executive, NMA director and CEO David Walker began the opening ceremonies. “You never know where you’ll find public art,” he said, before passing the mic to Force Villareal, Prezant, the CEO of MGM Resorts Jim Murren, and various government ...

The clowns that appear throughout Ugo Rondinone’s work are generally mute and benignly lazy, but their presence is no less disturbing. In Rondinone’s recent solo show “A Horse with No Name,” three larger-than-life mannequin-like clown sculptures sat or lay on the floor, torpid and half dressed, with closed eyes.

The title of Ugo Rondinone’s installation, Moonlight and Aspirin, 1997, was well—suited to his surreal, psychologically complex work. In one room of the gallery, the walls were almost entirely hidden by a palisade of rough fir boards, except in places here and there where small loudspeakers poked through, playing ’60s songs.

View of “Ugo Rondinone: I ♥ John Giorno,” 2015–16. Photo: André Morin. Living up to its impassioned title, “Ugo Rondinone: I ♥ John Giorno” was an adulation of the American counterculture icon as a poet, artist, friend, lover, activist, archivist, muse, and inspiration.

Seasoned Rondinone watchers will recall that his fiberglass clowns go barefoot, and that their other characteristics are proneness, an exposed navel (behind which, one should note, is the location of the human body’s center of gravity), and a serene expression that suggests Bruce Nauman’s circus performers—the undisguised reference ...

Certain projects of Rondinone’s have centered on the artist’s recollection of the work of his contemporaries—for example, the figures of Charles Ray. Though at first glance, Rondinone’s publications look like German versions of Raymond Pettibon’s notebooks, in fact Rondinone’s books take off in a very different direction.

Rondinone’s recent exhibition at Matthew Marks Gallery, which at first glance appeared to be yet another reenactment of a painterly and sculptural endgame, was, on closer inspection, marked by a painstaking attention to process in the form of artisanal craft.

Rondinone’s buffoon is a tragic everyman caught between the banality of his own life and his job of making us forget the banality of ours; a role, one senses, that Rondinone identifies with. In a later version of the same installation, done for a show in 1997 at Le Consortium in Dijon, Rondinone worked on a grander scale, now presenting the ...