Rockbund Art Museum 上海外滩美术馆

The Rockbund Art Museum is thrilled to introduce the very first exhibition in China of the internationally acclaimed artist Ugo Rondinone, born in 1964 in Brunnen, Switzerland, and living in New York since 1997.

Ugo Rondinone’s oeuvre takes up a unique position in the contemporary art scene and his contribution in revisiting the codes and the histories of the visual arts has been exceptional.

Having developed very precise and obsessive series—from clown sculptures to stone figures, target paintings, masks, oversized wax light bulbs, stripe paintings, landscape ink drawings, bronze still-life objects, video and sound installations—Ugo Rondinone advances extremely diverse techniques, combining concepts with performative figures, abstract forms with raw materials, exploring themes of fantasy and desire, branching out in literature and poetry, contemporary cinema and the visual arts.

Paying very close attention to his art projects, Ugo Rondinone always refuses to conceive of his solo exhibitions as a display of artworks but rather as a total art statement, offering the visitor a very strong visual and emotional experience combined with powerful poetic and critical observations.

Ugo Rondinone states: "Since 2007 all my exhibitions have used the natural colors of the material that was used in the production of the work: stone, clay, earth, bronze or aluminum. It's now time to bring back all the colors of the spectrum. This exhibition will combine different color works from the past and the present into one unifying installation."

In recent years, Ugo Rondinone has produced a whole set of works related to a dominant black-grey-brown color series. Most major exhibitions for this series included the famous primitive stone sculptures commissioned by the Public Art Fund for the Rockefeller Plaza in New York (Human Nature, 2013), the earth installations and body wax sculptures at M – Museum Leuven (Thank You Silence, 2013), the handmade bronze bird sculptures and black ink landscape paintings at Eva Presenhuber gallery (Kiss Now Kill Later, 2011).

Regarding the exhibition title, the curator Larys Frogier elaborates: “Rondinone’s large rainbow sign BREATHE WALK DIE embodies perfectly how simple and enigmatic, how imperative and simultaneously poetic the affirmation and allure of BREATHE WALK DIE could be. This new neon sign, following others like WE ARE POEMS, HELL YES!, or OUR MAGICAL HOUR seems to point out both raw reality and hidden aspects of our history. The sign encapsulates and makes palpable an unnamed collective desire, and, in turn, inspires a new one: to understand why this hour, for example, is so magical.”

上海外滩美术馆荣幸地邀请国际著名艺术家乌戈·罗迪纳（Ugo Rondinone）举办他在中国的首个展览。乌戈·罗迪纳于1964年生于瑞士的布鲁嫩，1997年后生活于纽约。

乌戈·罗迪纳的作品在当代艺术界有着独特的地位，为重新理解视觉艺术的规范和历史做出了卓越的贡献。

通过无比精巧、迷人的系列作品（小丑雕塑和石雕，圆圈形的绘画，橡胶面具，超大的蜡质灯泡，聚酯纤维上的条纹画，墨绘风景，铜质静物，录像与声音装置），乌戈·罗迪纳对极为不同的技艺进行尝试，将观念与活生生的形象、抽象形式与粗质材料相结合，探索幻想和欲望的主题，将创作延伸到文学与诗歌，当代电影与视觉艺术领域。

乌戈·罗迪纳对自己的艺术项目极为用心，他拒绝将自己的个展构想成单纯作品的展示，而是要做成一份完整的艺术宣言，带给观者非常强大的视觉情感体验，伴随着强烈的诗意与批判性的省思。

据艺术家本人介绍：“自2007年以来，我的所有展览都是以作品材料为主的自然色：石头，黏土，地球，青铜或者铝。我想是时候把所有光谱中的颜色都带回来了。这次展览将会结合过去和现在不同颜色的作品融合为一个统一的装置。”

在过去的数年间，乌戈·罗迪纳的全部创作都与以黑、灰、褐色为主的系列作品有关。这一系列作品的重要展览包括公共艺术基金会邀请他为纽约洛克菲勒广场创作的著名的原始石雕（《人性》，2013），在勒芬的M美术馆的土地装置和蜡质人像（《谢谢你，寂静》，2013），在Eva Presenhuber画廊的手工铜鸟雕塑和黑墨风景画（《先吻，后杀》，2011）。

关于展览标题，策展人拉瑞斯·弗洛乔诠释道：“‘呼吸行走死亡’，这巨大的彩色霓虹灯标题完美地展现了展览《呼吸行走死亡》之宣告和暗示是何等的简约与神秘，迫切而又富于诗意。这件全新的霓虹灯作品，继同类作品《我们是诗》（WE ARE POEMS）或《是呗！》（HELL YES!）之后，仿佛意欲指出原生态的现实，以及我们的历史中隐藏的层面。这一标题将无名的集体欲望压缩封存，并使其可见，又激起一种新的集体欲望：比如，去理解，为何此时此刻，如此魔幻。”