Ugo Rondinone’s “the sun at 4pm” at Gladstone Gallery

Gladstone Gallery is pleased to present the sun at 4pm, an exhibition that continues Ugo Rondinone’s decades-long examination of the link between the natural world and the human condition. Extending the artist’s mining of the German Romantic movement, and particularly Caspar David Friedrich, as a primary source of reference, the four distinct bodies of work on view – mountain, sun, waterfall, and cloud – present a setting wherein the commonplace of the everyday gives way to the sublimity of environmental phenomena.

In formations that immediately call to mind rock spire outcroppings, or “hoodoo,” endemic to the Badlands of North America, Rondinone’s mountain sculptures consist of rocks vertically stacked on concrete plinths of varying sizes. Austere in their reference to Minimalist composition and titling, the artist mitigates severity in both the Day-Glo coloring of the boulders, as well as the deferential nod to the tradition of stone stacking, a practice seen from prehistoric dolmens to contemporary cairns. In these gestures, Rondinone extends the specificity of art history to a universality gleaned from cult objects that exist worldwide. It is this ability to meld the romanticism of the individual into the transcendence of the metaphysical that ties together all works in the exhibition.