Ugo Rondinone woman at a window 1822, 2016

Dating from 2015 and 2016, the quietly provocative aluminum artworks collectively known as Windows form a significant recent series from the Swiss born artist Ugo Rondinone. Each work in this series of life-size windows cast in aluminium is named after a painting by the German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich.

Left in their raw, silver-colored state after casting, each work in the series undermines the fundamental function of the window in daily life with their defiant solidity and sightless panes. Instead of diminishing the interiority of the spaces they hang in by allowing us to see outside, Rondinone’s metal windows reinforce a sense of isolation from the external world and provoke a palpable sense of enclosure.

The window is one of a number of common domestic objects, including doors, brick walls, light bulbs and clocks, that Rondinone has used as a motif over the course of his thirty-year long career. Frequently, he will subvert the imagery of these familiar, functional entities to create a tension between the external appearance of an object and its essence. “In my work,” the artist has said, “I like to slow and elapse temporalities, in which nothing is ever over and done with, everything can recur or be revived, and in which past, present, and future are looped together.”

In creating windows that restrict rather than facilitate a greater understanding of what lies beyond them, Rondinone generates a type of paradoxical viewing experience that is typical of his work. By disrupting the expected, the recurring images in his work are “static metaphors in transition,” he says. They provoke, “a present tense, where time has stopped and opened out to reveal suggestiveness or changelessness or hollowness.”

The articulation of an undefinable feeling, as oppose to a clearly communicated idea or narrative scenario, stems from the artist’s fascination with romantic imagery. The way in which German Romantic painters like Friedrich pioneered the incorporation of emotional subjectivity and dreamlike states into their dramatic landscape scenes has been particularly influential on Rondinone’s work. Among his first exhibited works were large-scale paintings of landscapes, a genre he was drawn to for its nostalgic evocations. For these early shows, the gallery windows were always boarded up to isolate the works from the bustle of the world around them, minimizing distractions to bring focus to the artworks. “I like when a space can create its own reality,” he has explained.

The Windows series pursue a similar goal. Here, the windows are symbolic of sight and of discovery. While they frame no external view, the evocative titles of each work in the series encourage the onlooker to use their imagination to project their own idea of a landscape onto the blank panes of the work. Far from restricting our vision, Windows encourage us to look deep into the mind’s eye.