Beschreibung:

Ugo Rondinone air/ gets/ into/ everything/ even/ nothing 2006 Cast aluminium, white enamel. 381 x 381 x 335 cm. (150 x 150 x 131 7/8 in). This work is from an edition of three plus two artist's proofs and is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity signed by the artist.
Provenance Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zürich Exhibited Zürich, Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Ugo Rondinone air gets into everything even nothing, 10 June – 30 September 2006 (another example exhibited, resin cast); New York, Creative Time, Art on the Plaza, Ugo Rondinone air gets into everything even nothing & get up girl a sun is running the world, 1 February – 31 August 2007 (another example exhibited); Venice, 52nd Venice Biennale, Swiss Pavilion, Church of San Stae, Ugo Rondinone & Urs Fischer 2007 (another example exhibited); Des Moines, Iowa, The John and Mary Pappajohn Sculpture Park, September 2009 – present (another example exhibited) Catalogue Essay Ever the hopeless romantic, Ugo Rondinone creates eclectic works in which notions of the sublime are tinged with a poetic melancholia. Standing at nearly four metres tall, air/ gets/ into/ everything/ even/ nothing is a representation of a 2,000-year-old olive tree originally found in the countryside outside Naples. Life, death and the passage of time are evoked by the tree's gnarled trunk and bare branches, so beautifully shaped by the forces of nature over the course of two millennia. A living organism with its own cycle of growth, reproduction and decay, now frozen in aluminium and white enamel, Rondinone's tree becomes a contemplation on the story of creation, a vehicle for mankind's shared memory and experience. This depiction of the natural landscape as a metaphor for human psychology, with the tree at its core, has been a recurring theme for Ugo Rondinone As early as 1991, he began representing a nostalgic Arcadian ideal, with monumental Indian ink drawings depicting the woods, hills, streams and cottages of a pre-modern world, their simple beauty suggesting man's lost innocence. This existential exercise is taken further in Rondinone's trees which, while appearing to arrest the passage of time, in fact reflect upon our inescapable transience. Caught between life and death, the fragile nature of Rondinone's tree is reminiscent of the oeuvre of the American sculptor Robert Gober In both of these artists' fantastic, hyperreal worlds, life can be interpreted as a melancholy progress through a failing world. "What interests me about the two 2000-year-old olive trees is the fact that once they are cast bare naked they become a memoriam of condensed time. Through a cast olive tree you can not only experience the lapse of real time, that is lived time, frozen in its given form, but through this transformation also a different calibrated temporality. Time can be experienced as a lived abstraction, where the shape is formed by this accumulation of time and wind force. If my work in general has a nonlinear approach to the world, then the system and concept of time, which has occupied my work since the beginning, gives me a certain sense of grounding." (Ugo Rondinone from a press release for Creative Time's project, Art on the Plaza: air gets into everything even nothing & get up girl a sun is running the world, New York, 2007) Read More