Ugo Rondinone - Vocabulary of Solitude

Next spring Ugo Rondinone (b. 1964, Switzerland, lives and works in New York) will fill the Bodon Galleries at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen with an immense installation comprising existing and new works from his colour spectrum series, half mandalas, windows and thousands of rainbow drawings. 45 lifelike sculptures of clowns will form the centrepiece of Ugo Rondinone: Vocabulary of Solitude, the artist's first solo exhibition in the Netherlands.

Rondinone gives everyday motifs and images a poetic dimension by isolating or enlarging them. On the floor of the 1500-square-metre Bodon Galleries, visitors will move between life-size clown figures, each engaged in a different everyday activity: sleeping, daydreaming, waking up, sitting, running, etc. In this installation, the clown—at the centre of everything and in the middle of nothing—is the personification of unhappiness. Rondinone lets his huge installations speak for themselves. An artwork, he says, is successful if the viewer doesn't have to think and is led naturally in a particular direction: "Good art revolutionises your whole being. It is something that stops you, or slows you down."

The exhibition, which opens during Art Rotterdam Week (February 10–14, 2016), is an international partnership and will travel to several other museums after its showing in Rotterdam.

Ugo Rondinone From poetic installations in public spaces to life-size drawings, Ugo Rondinone's work balances on the edge of euphoria and depression. He is one of the world's leading visual artists. He represented Switzerland at the Venice Biennale in 2007 and has had major solo exhibitions at the Pompidou Centre, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, the Kunsthalle Wien and Palais Tokyo.