Ugo Rondinone molucca sea, 2023

molucca sea is a unique sculpture, a figure of a horse cast in translucent blue glass. It is part of the recent series of works, consisting of less than 30 unique casts to date. Each work of the series is slightly smaller than life size and has two different shades of blue, separated by a horizontal line.

This new series of glass sculptures takes as a point of departure Ugo Rondinone's major body of work that includes a collection of horses, Primal (2013), of fish, Primordial (2016), and birds, Primitive (2011) all scaled down and cast in bronze. The groupings of creatures from sea, land and air represent the wider world, and encapsulate the trinity of themes—natural phenomena, Romanticism and existentialism—that underpin the artist’s oeuvre.

Both the uniqueness and the hand-made character of the sculpture are further emphasized by the titles given to individual works in the series. These titles, functioning rather more like evocative names, refer to seas. The Molucca Sea is located in the western Pacific Ocean, around the vicinity of Indonesia, specifically bordered by the Indonesian Islands of Celebes (Sulawesi) to the west, Halmahera to the east, and the Sula Islands to the south.