Ugo Rondinone , cold moon

Ugo Rondinone
cold moon,
2011
Cast aluminum, white enamel
600 x 416 cm
Courtesy Ugo Rondinone, Studio Rondinone and Sadie Coles HQ (London)

Ugo Rondinone’s cold moon is a sculpture of a 2,000-year-old olive tree that belongs to a long-running series of life-size sculptures of ancient olive trees in white-painted aluminum, started in the mid-2000’s. The series reflects the artist’s enduring exploration of nature, and of trees, as motif and metaphor through which to interpret and compress time. 

Contemplative in mood, Ugo Rondinone’s cast of the living specimen, meticulously records the gnarled bark and branches in a contemplative vision of white, evoking a sense of time in suspension or a shifting temporality. In its solitary, displaced and subtly articulated appearance, the works speaks dually of life and death. The tree is both a meticulous recreation of a real tree, but also an avowedly artificial object – colorless and ossified.

Biography of the artist

Born in 1964 in Brunnen, Switzerland. Lives and works in New York, United States.
Along with paintings and immersive installations, Ugo Rondinone makes sculptures in various materials, monumental landscape drawings, intimate still life drawings, and text-based works. His sculptures channel both psychological expressiveness and profound insight into the human condition and the relationship between human beings and nature. Ugo Rondinone’s artworks are full of poetry and reflect an inclination for universal themes such as time, cosmic cycles or day and night opposition.