Installation view, 2015. Courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London.

Installation view, 2015. Courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London.

LONDON.- Ugo Rondinone’s autumn exhibition at Sadie Coles HQ, clouds + mountains + waterfalls, comprises three new bodies of work. Each extends the artist’s long-running interest in natural phenomena and their reformulation in art.  

Rondinone’s Cloud paintings are large canvases painted in fine gradations of sky blue. Their rectangular fields transform into cloud-like undulations at their upper perimeters, creating a sharp contrast between the vaporous trompe l’oeil image within each painting and the jigsaw-style silhouette of the canvas itself. As with the artist’s other groups of paintings (including the Landscapes, Mandalas and Horizons), these works depict immeasurable space while also exuding a contrary sense of finiteness: the borders of the canvas arrest the illusion of infinity, while the title of each refers to the precise date of its creation. Rondinone has remarked that “they form an entity of time and space”, at once universal and contained. The near-blank surfaces of the Cloud paintings, ethereally painted using a sponge and dilute pigment, act as sites of imaginative possibility, in the same way as clouds themselves conjure phantasmal images and associations. In this way, they carry echoes both of Colour Field abstraction and the visionary seascapes and skies of Romantic visionaries such as Caspar David Friedrich, while at the same time subverting those precursors through their cartoon borders. More immediately, the Cloud series forms an airy counterpoint to Rondinone’s long-running series of Brick paintings, which depict solid brick walls in thickly-layered paint. 

Ugo Rondinone, zwanzigsterjunizweitausendundfünfzehn, 2015. © the artist, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London.

Ugo Rondinone, vierundzwanzigsterjunizweitausendundfünfzehn, 2015 © the artist, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London.

Ugo Rondinone, sechsundzwanzigsterjunizweitausendundfünfzehn, 2015  © the artist, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London.

Ugo Rondinone, neunundzwanzigsterjunizweitausendundfünfzehn, 2015 © the artist, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London.

Ugo Rondinone, ersterjulizweitausendundfünfzehn, 2015 © the artist, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London.

Ugo Rondinone, neunterjulizweitausendundfünf, 2015 © the artist, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London.

Mediating between geological formations and abstract compositions, Rondinone’s new Mountain sculptures consist of rocks stacked vertically on concrete plinths in groups ranging between two and six. Inspired by naturally-occurring Hoodoos (spires or pyramids of rock) and balancing rock formations, the stacks also evoke the art of meditative rock balancing. Each stone is painted a different Day-Glo colour, with the sculptures’ titles referring in Minimalist vein to their component pigments. The works appear poised between monumentality and collapse – seeming to defy gravity in their teetering formations, but equally to depend on it, bearing down like unsteady pillars on their concrete plinths. As with the Cloud paintings, stark physicality collides with painterly abstraction – each Mountain (like any real-life mountain) is caught between rugged literalism and metaphorical potential. As a group, they invoke parallels as divergent as the stacked totems of Barbara Hepworth and the paper cut-outs of Henri Matisse. Many veer towards anthropomorphism, suggesting figures in crouching poses or gesturing attitudes, while others abruptly resist any such associative reading. 

Ugo Rondinone, black orange mountain, 2015. Painted stone, stainless steel, pedestal. © the artist, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London.

Ugo Rondinone, pink blue mountain, 2015. Painted stone, stainless steel, pedestal. © the artist, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London.

Ugo Rondinone, white pink black mountain, 2015. Painted stone, stainless steel, pedestal. © the artist, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London. 

Ugo Rondinone, blue red yellow mountain, 2015. Painted stone, stainless steel, pedestal. © the artist, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London.

Ugo Rondinone, blue yellow mountain, 2015. Painted stone, stainless steel, pedestal. © the artist, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London. 

Ugo Rondinone, blue pink white mountain, 2015. Painted stone, stainless steel, pedestal. © the artist, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London. 

Ugo Rondinone, grey black red mountain, 2015. Painted stone, stainless steel, pedestal. © the artist, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London.

Ugo Rondinone, silver black purple mountain, 2015. Painted stone, stainless steel, pedestal. © the artist, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London. 

Ugo Rondinone, yellow orange red mountain, 2015. Painted stone, stainless steel, pedestal. © the artist, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London. 

Ugo Rondinone, black blue yellow green mountain, 2015. Painted stone, stainless steel, pedestal. © the artist, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London.  

Ugo Rondinone, red silver yellow mountain, 2015. Painted stone, stainless steel, pedestal. © the artist, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London.

Ugo Rondinone, purple black yellow blue mountain, 2015. Painted stone, stainless steel, pedestal. © the artist, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London. 

Ugo Rondinone, green yellow orange red pink mountain, 2015. Painted stone, stainless steel, pedestal. © the artist, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London.

Ugo Rondinone, orange yellow green blue pink red mountain, 2015. Painted stone, stainless steel, pedestal. © the artist, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London.

Waterfall sculptures form the third new series – thin, freestanding lines modelled by hand in clay and cast in aluminium, whose spiralling forms evoke jets of water. Like the Mountain sculptures, these vertical forms succeed in appearing simultaneously weightless and earthbound, graceful and awkward. Delicately balanced on the floor, they seem both to cascade downwards and unfurl upwards in the manner of an Indian rope trick, yet their mottled surfaces – indented with fingerprints and ridges – profess their rigidity and artifice. Rondinone’s paintings and sculptures have frequently referred to primordial phenomena – air, moons, the sun, the cosmos – in their titles or forms. Referring concurrently to the natural world, romanticism and existentialism, his latest works encapsulate a “mental trinity” that has underpinned his art for more than twenty years.

Installation view, 2015. Courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London.

Ugo Rondinone, olo'upena falls, 2015 © the artist, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London.

Ugo Rondinone, mutarazi falls, 2015 © the artist, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London. 

Ugo Rondinone, three sisters falls, 2015 © the artist, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London. 

Ugo Rondinone, vinnu falls, 2015 © the artist, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London.