Ugo Rondinone
Summer 2023

The prominent hill overarching the Städel Garden Halls will be transformed into a strange landscape where grotesque beings will welcome the public. In his workgroup “Sunrise: East”, the Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone (b. 1964) assigns every month a head with characteristic, but also strongly reduced facial features. Shaped in silvery-shiny aluminium, the clunky, over-life-sized sculptural heads are reduced to their facial expressions: their mouths agape, they gaze through tiny eyes with an air now friendly and naïve, now sceptical, now surprised, now ghoulish. Reminiscent of ritual masks and spirits, but also the pictorial language of comics, emoticons, and memes, they trigger a wide range of associations. The visitors to the Städel Garden are invited to encounter all twelve beings—and thus all twelve months—face to face, and to experience the joys, adversities, and emotions of an entire year.

Curator: Svenja Grosser (Deputy Head of Contemporary Art, Städel Museum)

Picture: Ugo Rondinone, sunrise. east. march, 2005, Courtesy the artist, Photo: Stefan Altenburger

For technical reasons, we have decided, together with the artist, to postpone the exhibition of his sculptural group “sunrise. east”: The works will be presented in the Städel Museum’s garden in the summer of 2023 (originally planned for 6/24/2022 to 10/30/2022). The exhibition will be the first garden project after the redesign of the Städel Museum’s sculpture garden.

The exhibition “Ugo Rondinone. Life Time” at the Schirn will take place as planned.