Ugo Rondinone
6/24–10/30/2022

In summer 2022, 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. Concurrently with the intervention in the Städel Garden, the exhibition “Ugo Rondinone: Life Time” will be on view at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt.

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

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