KÜNZELSAU.- Ugo Rondinone, a Swiss artist based in New York, was awarded the 2023 Robert Jacobsen Prize at the award ceremony in Künzelsau. The prestigious award of the Würth Foundation comes with a prize money of EUR 50,000. “In his poetic and conceptual works, Ugo Rondinone addresses the contradictions of life and creates a dialogue between the artificial and the natural, culture and society, as well as eternity and transience,” said Philipp Demandt, speaker in honor of the artist and jury member of the Robert Jacobsen Prize on the artist’s award.
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On the occasion of the award, Museum Würth 2, in cooperation with the artist, opened the accompanying exhibition “Ugo Rondinone – solar spirit” in the museum’s belvedere and in the sculpture garden around Carmen Würth Forum in Künzelsau until 23 March 2025.
The conceptual, media and installation artist Ugo Rondinone, born in Brunnen, Switzerland, in 1964, is one of the best-known artists of his generation worldwide and has shown his works in numerous solo exhibitions in London, Paris, Boston, Zurich, Rotterdam and Frankfurt, among others. After all, his monumental groups of works can repeatedly be found dominating public space, whether in urban contexts such as New York and Paris or in the Nevada desert. Seemingly with ease, Rondinone pursues the original nature of his motifs and plays with a universally understandable vocabulary or, as he puts it himself, “the visual alphabet of archetypes,” which can be experienced through the works presented in Künzelsau.
He puts the weighty materials of his expansive sculptures, such as stone or bronze, in contrast with a naïve aesthetic of form and poetic subtlety. For example, the primordial installation made up of bronze fish floating freely in the room transforms the belvedere of Museum Würth 2 into a kind of aquarium of origins, in which visitors can literally immerse themselves. The circular arrangement of his sculpture group sunrise. east symbolizes the course of the year with the help of twelve sometimes grotesque aluminum heads alluding to the months. The wide range of ambivalent human emotions is reflected in their faces in such a striking way that sometimes remind you of the pictorial idiom used in comics or the currently ubiquitous emojis. The great importance of idiom in Rondinone’s oeuvre is also evident in autumn moon: The title promises an autumn moon; what we see, however, is a cast of a 2,000-year-old olive tree that Rondinone presents as a “time capsule”. The moon itself is only implied indirectly in the shine of the enameled surface. The colossal stone figure the loyal, eight meters high and weighing in at around 40 tons, also impresses not only with its sheer size. It is the most recent work featured in the exhibition and made of stone, the most original material for Rondinone. This brings the works presented in Künzelsau full circle when it comes to the materials used.
The exhibition “Ugo Rondinone – solar spirit. 15th Robert Jacobsen Prize by the Würth Foundation“ at Museum Würth 2, Künzelsau, can be visited daily from 10:00 to 18:00 until 23 March 2025. Admission is free.
