On view at The Contemporary Austin – Laguna Gloria
Ugo Rondinone’s work bridges natural and artificial worlds with a minimalist, pared-down aesthetic and a humorous Pop sensibility. His objects and installations engage with the environment around us in wry, funny, and poignant ways, tapping into human emotions such as love, loss, death, and desire. In his work, Rondinone employs a wide range of media and forms, ranging from everyday objects such as fruit, wood, or furniture cast in bronze and painted in a hyperrealistic style, to a room of forty-five realistic clown sculptures in various poses of rest and contemplation. Recently, the artist has referenced the natural world for inspiration, in particular the raw and ancient material of stone. In 2013, the artist installed Human Nature, a grouping of nine, large-scale anthropomorphic stone sculptures in Rockefeller Center, followed by Seven Magic Mountains in 2016, an installation of seven massive totems comprised of stacked boulders painted in Day-Glo colors, as a site of pilgrimage in a remote desert location near Las Vegas, Nevada.
In this spirit, the true consists of several coarse boulders stacked into a primitive, figurative form, part of an ongoing series of similar sculptures by the artist, each with erudite titles (such as the ambitious, the bewitching, the cordial, the dutiful, and the splendid, to name a few). Here, the title might suggest balance, authenticity, fact, or a philosophical core of the human condition-truth. Placed at the entrance to the lower meadow, the figure is playful and unexpected, seeming to welcome viewers from afar.