Ugo Rondinone Knihy

Written and drawn in Indian ink, Ugo Rondinone's Diaries have played an important role in the Swiss artist's oeuvre since the early 1990s. The Diaries are conceived as notations covering an entire year, and titled 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996 etc.--yet both the contents and the titles of the works are completely fictitious. In his sheets, formally inspired by underground comics, Rondinone blends fiction with the mimesis of authenticity, leading readers in and out of intimate--and lonely--spaces and times. These works constitute a kind of report about subjective experience sounding out, bearing, manipulating, and stylizing the borders of collective experience, testing the limits of boredom, rapture, love, failure, and excess. The artist's book Hell, Yes newly regroups various elements of Rondinone's oeuvre--he translates the illustrations and text of his Diaries into photography and printed text, combining his photographic series In the Sweet Years Remaining with the 1998 Diary into a filmic whole. Also included here is an appendix that features, for the first time, all of Rondinone's diary texts in English.

Echoing Rimbaud's "Je suis un autre", Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone uses the question of identity as a main theme in his multimedia creations. His works are a balancing act of ambiguities -- from art to commerce, the fashionably hip to melancholic withdrawal, seduction to rejection. Exemplifying these undercurrents are his photomontages, in which he superimposes his face onto the bodies of famous models in sometimes elegant, sometimes lascivious poses. This book documents Rondinone's activity over the past six years, presenting a variety of works -- diary entries in the style of underground comics; videos capturing the banality of everyday life; hypnotizing circle pictures; clowns; hermetic spatial installations; and monumental brush and ink landscape pictures.

Beautifully designed, text-heavy and smart, Album is a deliberately unrepresentative compilation of genre-hopping textual and visual material placed in orbit around the work of the influential young Swiss artists Urs Fischer, Yves Netzhammer, Ugo Rondinone and Christine Streuli--all of whom were born in the early- to mid-1970s, and all of whom represented Switzerland at the 2007 Venice Biennale. Finely printed on uncoated paper, the book includes specially commissioned critical texts, conversations, reports and visual essays that address, sometimes straightforwardly, sometimes obliquely, the larger issues implied in this group's work--such as notions of time, the animal and the human, shock and materiality. With a similarly eclectic mix of historical analysis, literary tableau and art-world journalism, the book imagines a psycho-geography of Switzerland, from its Alps to its art-filled bunkers. Sensitive to the nature of its context, informative and discursive rather than promotional, the book is rounded off with a survey on the future of biennials in relation to the present-day "fair mania" and a selection of critical views.

Encompassing monumental sculptures, installations, paintings, collages, and delicate small-scale sculptures, the artistic practice of the Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone (*1964 in Brunnen) is constantly in flux. Often combining manufactured elements with manual labor, his artworks investigate the relationship between humans and the environment that surrounds them. The catalogue vividly documents Rondinone’s first major solo exhibition in France, which turned the Carré d’Art in Nîmes into a synthesis of the arts through which one can walk. Generating a specific feeling for space and time, the sculptures and paintings were transformed into a scenic installation. Star-filled skies, monumental landscapes, and animal sculptures were combined to constitute a poetic whole that conveys the magnificence of natural phenomena, human existence, and the cosmos in a contemporary reinterpretation of the Romantic approach. Exhibition: Carré d’Art – Musée d’art contemporain, Nîmes 15.4.– 18.9.2016