PRESENTATION: Ugo Rondinone-The Rainbow Body

Using photography, video, painting, drawing, sculpture, sound, and text, Ugo Rondinone particularly enjoys destabilizing the viewers’ perceptions and unsettling their certainties by developing surprising sensorial environments. Rearranging content and formal elements through a personal poetic filter while drawing directly on the outside world, he envelops the audience in a synesthetic experience.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Aspen Art Museum Archive

Ugo Rondinone presents his solo exhibition “The Rainbow Body” at the Aspen Art Museum, The Museum’s second-floor gallery is recast as a prismatic arena where fluorescent, lifelike sculptures of dancers sit at rest and in waiting. In his practice at large, Rondinone is celebrated for expansive installations, working with photography, painting, poetry, outdoor sculpture, and neon rainbow signage. His visual vocabulary often incorporates the natural and primordial world, wherein rocks, clouds, trees, and the sun are recurrent motifs. Language and systems of communication such as lyrics or slogans mark other modes of exploring human subjectivity and experience.  “The Rainbow Body” considers the multivalent significance of the rainbow. This natural occurrence is at once nature’s most delicate and ephemeral phenomenon, and an emblem rife with mystical aura and political undertones. “The rainbow is a bridge between everyone and everything,” says Rondinone, “nature is not something apart from us, but intrinsic.” The exhibition’s title references a spiritual rite in Tibetan Buddhism in which the body is transformed into light upon death. This conversion is attained only by devoted practitioners and marks the highest form of realization. In this process, the human corpse and mind vanish, replaced by five-colored radiant lights. The 16 fluorescent, life-size wax casts of dancers in the gallery allude to this process. Averting their gazes, the hyperrealistic nude figures are impervious to viewers, but pulsing with vitality. Candles cast in bronze complete the scene, resting nearby on the bright yellow gallery floor. In Rondinone’s tableau, a stained-glass clock channels light through an adjacent nave—a lens to mark the passage of time as his dancers are captured in a state of deliberate stillness. These three distinct series—each conceived over ten years ago—evolved in tandem, but come together at Aspen Art Museum for the first time. This conceptual confluence denotes a trilogy of sorts, where materials morph and ideas overlap. Originally produced with earthen pigments in shades of brown and green, Rondinone’s wax dancers here appear vivid and multihued, signaling a progression toward a more prismatic, transcendent realm. Cast with uncanny detail, these bodies appear pliant and poised for transformation. In contrast, the artist’s bronze candles, aptly titled “still lives”, capture a moment of impermanence in a more enduring material. The stained-glass clock in the adjacent gallery acts as both an emblem of time and a window into an uncertain beyond. Installed without hands, with the device’s usage no longer apparent, time falls away. The exhibition draws out the symbolic interconnection between these bodies of work, culminating in an electric arrival. Forging links between the natural world and the spiritual realm, Rondinone continues his examination of the body’s dematerialization and human encounters with the sublime.

Photo: Ugo Rondinone, nude (xxxxxxxxxxx) (rainbow), 2021. Exhibition view, kamel mennour, Paris, 202. Courtesy Studio Rondinone and Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich; Kukje Gallery, Seoul; Esther Schipper, Berlin; Gladstone, New York; Mennour, Paris; and Sadie Coles HQ, London, © The artist. Photo: Stefan Altenburger

Info: Curators: Nicola Lees, Daniel Merritt and Simone Krug, Aspen Art Museum, 637 East Hyman Avenue, Aspen, CO, USA, Duration: 12/12/2024-30/3/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 10:00-18:00, www.aspenartmuseum.org/