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Ugo Rondinone dreizehnterseptemberzweitausenddreiundzwanzig, 2023
Watercolor on canvas, artist's frame
30,5 x 45,7 cm (unframed)
31,8 x 47 cm (framed)
31,8 x 47 cm (framed)
Ugo Rondinone's series of paintings collectively titled Mattituck—watercolors on canvas created since 2019—depicts either the sunrise, sunset, or moon in the sky as seen from the artist's home in Mattituck, NY. Each painting in the series features a stripped-down composition rendered in just three colors.
“Finding myself in an empty studio for the last 3 months, I resorted to an intimate work: drawing poems and brushing sunsets and moonrise paintings. This is a good time for me to work in silence—cocooning myself into my own time, these two pastimes I love most and tire of least. The Mattituck paintings show the view from my studio window across the Long Island Sound. My first summer in Mattituck was a revelation, forcing me to examine my surroundings with the freshness of a friendly alien. Every day, just when the twilight started, John [Giorno, the artist’s late partner] and I would set our chairs in position and experience a new sunset, a magical illumination of the ordinary—lucid and lyrical. Looking at the sunset makes one feel that the physical and the spiritual are not separate.” —Ugo Rondinone
The Mattituck series also evokes other bodies of work by the artist, including his Horizon paintings composed of extended horizontal bands of varying weights; and his Sun paintings, which consist of several bands of blurred color painted with acrylic spray on a completely round canvas, as if emanating from the center of a circle. Referring to the natural world, romanticism and existentialism, Rondinone's works contain a "mental trinity" that has underpinned his art for thirty years.