Ugo Rondinone valuation
Swiss artist of clowns, rainbows, stone giants and the fluorescent totems of Seven Magic Mountains in the Nevada desert.
Ugo Rondinone was born in Brunnen, Switzerland, in 1964, to Italian parents.
What a work by Ugo Rondinone is worth
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Bio
Ugo Rondinone was born in Brunnen, Switzerland, in 1964, to Italian parents. He moved to Zurich in 1983 to work as an assistant to Hermann Nitsch, studied at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna from 1986 to 1990, and moved to New York in 1997. His work runs across almost every medium: concentric-circle paintings and ink landscapes, rainbow-coloured word signs, clowns in wax and bronze, casts of olive trees, bronze horses, birds and fish, and figures built from rough-hewn stone. Human Nature, nine monumental bluestone figures, stood at Rockefeller Center in New York in 2013, and Seven Magic Mountains, seven towers of fluorescent painted boulders in the desert outside Las Vegas, opened in 2016. He represented Switzerland at the Venice Biennale of 2007, alongside Urs Fischer. The poet John Giorno was his partner from 1997, and they married in 2017.
Because he works in so many materials, the first question is which body of work a piece belongs to: the circle paintings and landscape drawings, the painted bronze and stone sculptures, the clowns, or the editioned multiples. Many sculptures are cast in editions with artist's proofs, so the edition number, the foundry and the certificate matter, and painted bronze should be checked for chips and wear to the surface.
Vienna, Venice and Seven Magic Mountains
Vocabulary of Solitude, made between 2014 and 2016, is a group of forty-five clowns, each at rest in a single pose. The nuns + monks of 2019 and 2020 are two-tone painted bronzes cast from limestone originals.
The bronze horses, titled primal, belong to a series that also includes birds, primitive, of 2011, and fish, primordial, of 2018.
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