The eighth Borås international biennial of contemporary art highlights our relationship to time, space, and site, exploring links to our surroundings, the landscape, and the environment. Ugo Rondinone is participating with two works: long last happy, installed at the Stora torget square, and the sun, installed near the Sven Eriksonsplatsen road.
A bright arch above Borås delivers an appeal: long last happy. This message of eternal bliss is timeless and unites people over millennia and continents. Hope is something we all have in common. The greeting conveys a subtle undercurrent of melancholic irony too. In the time of information flow, fragmentation and profit-oriented surveillance – are consoling words such as these still meaningful? And yet, we cannot defend ourselves against the healing power of the words and the contagious joy of the colours, which conjure up pure and true experience. Rondinone’s rainbow neon installations draw on poetic lines of text, materializing them in a largescale luminescent works. The first one – cry me a river – started the series in 1997. long last happy is the latest iteration. Conceived in 2021, its title is a reference to a short story collection by writer Barry Hannah. As with many of Rondinone’s major works, the bright rainbow sculpture speaks to the viewer directly. The artist himself believes that a work does not need to be understood through linguistic conventions, but only by feeling its power. For him, art is a spiritual and transcendental discipline.
the sun's (2022) golden branches are joined into a circle – the symbol of universal unity, the cycle of life and the power of plants. Similar signs are found on prehistoric rock carvings, or on the instruments of shamans and other, ritualistic patterns. A reminder of the link between the celestial sun and the life on earth. The sublime power of time and nature are recurring themes in Rondinone’s works, which often highlight tensions between the present and the incomprehensible end. the sun – a monumental sun ring of gilded bronze, cast from encircling tree branches – is the largest produced sun sculpture variation to date, with its 5 meter in diameter. Blunt ends of the individual tree trunks and twigs bind the sun to the ground, even as it seems to hang in the air. To quote Rondinone, “the sculpture is a celebration of life; its seasons and rhythms, its plants and stones with which we share the planet and our own wild life.”
Ugo Rondinone was born in 1964 in Brunnen, Switzerland. He studied at the Universität für Angewandte Kunst in Vienna before moving to New York in 1997, where he lives and works to this day. His work has been the subject of recent institutional exhibitions at Belvedere, Vienna (2021), Tamayo Museum, Mexico City (2022), Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2022), Petit Palais, Paris (2022), Scuola Grande San Giovanni Evangelista di Venezia, Venice (2022), Musée d'Art et d'Histoire, Geneva (2023), Storm King, New York (2023), Städel Museum, Frankfurt (2023) and Museum SAN, Wonju (2024). In 2007 he represented Switzerland at the 52nd Venice Biennale. Forthcoming exhibitions include: Kunstmuseum Lucerne, Switzerland, July 2024, and Aspen Art Museum, Colorado, December 2024.
Borås Art Biennial 2024 - Layers, Loops, Lines
With Ugo Rondinone
Various locations in Borås, Sweden
www.boraskonstmuseum.se. (This link opens in a new tab).. (This link opens in a new tab).
Through September 15, 2024