ART CITIES:Zurich-Ugo Rondinone

You find ways to protect yourself, you build walls. The walls represent stability, the outer, more formidable layer of our skin. When you inhabit a room long enough, you come to see it as an extension of your own body. To let others inside or come close is rarely without hesitation.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Galerie Eva Presenhuber Archive

For some, art is a way of making a place in the world. And not only, for that place can be thought of in terms of memory and a free floating dislocation. The symbol of the brick wall has been frequently used by Ugo Rondinone. The artist’s brick walls offer another sort of architecture, one that relates to the act of painting and, in their installation, to the poetics of space, to intimacy and isolation. The paintings are arranged in the gallery so that the viewer must wend his or her way through the room, a room which has now been overtaken by another. As he has so many times before, the artist transforms a room which is not a room, a gallery, a space of claimed neutrality, a white box that awaits its animation. Just as a wall is a kind of skin, so too is the canvas, and in this case the material of the paintings is oil on burlap, oil that seeps into its pores. In the artist’s remark “My father was a bricklayer, my mother was a seamstress”, we understand that art can sometimes offer a mode of autobiography. The references to the parental activities are shown in the laying of bricks in tidy rows on one side of the painting and the sewing of burlap pieces creating a patchwork on the other side. In Ugo Rondinone’s exhibition, we are reminded how the past is brought to life in the present, and how the here and now, actively inhabited, can be transformative.

Info:Walls+Windows+Doors, Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zahnradstrasse 21, Zurich, Duration: 136-24/7/15, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri: 10:00-18:00, Sat: 11:00-17:00, http://presenhuber.com