KYOTO.- Throughout his career, Ugo Rondinone has approached nature not simply as landscape, but as a psychic and spiritual condition—a space through which to contemplate the body, consciousness and our place within the vastness of space and time. For a new off-site project by Sadie Coles HQ and the artist’s first solo exhibition in Japan, seventeen stone figure sculptures, a sun painting, and a single totemic monk sculpture will be installed at Kiyomizu-dera Temple in Kyoto, one of the most celebrated and historic Buddhist places of worship in the country.

Rough-hewn from bluestone, the stone figures draw upon archaic forms, ancient cairns and the enduring human impulse to gather, balance and stack stone. Their elemental silhouettes evoke the inuksuk structures of Arctic Indigenous cultures, while also carrying a deeply personal resonance for Rondinone: his father was a stonemason. Installed in Jōju-in, or ‘Moon Garden Temple’, the sculptures bring the language of contemporary art into contact with an ancient spiritual landscape. Modernist forms appear to emerge from, rather than interrupt, their surroundings, creating a quiet conversation between different times and traditions.

Installed in direct response to the temple’s architecture and the contemplative atmosphere of its garden, the figures vary in scale, their elemental forms lending them an almost primordial presence. They appear at once as timeless deities, navigational markers and monumental forms. Their silent, grounded presence establishes a dialogue between the human body and the landscape, between permanence and impermanence, and between geological time and the fleeting duration of human life. This sense of elemental symbolism is also present in examples of Rondinone’s ongoing Sun and Monk series, in which recurring images of the sun and the meditative, anonymous figures serve as vehicles for contemplation and transcendence.

At Kiyomizu-dera, where centuries of ritual, architecture and landscape are closely intertwined, the exhibition encourages a slower way of looking, inviting reflection on how we inhabit the natural world and how our bodies, like the stones themselves, are shaped by forces that extend far beyond the limits of an individual life.

I feel deeply fortunate that my first exhibition in Japan takes place at Kiyomizu-dera, a place where nature, architecture, and spiritual life have coexisted for centuries. I cannot imagine a more meaningful setting for the first presence of my work in Japan. shaping silence, brings together three elemental archetypes: the monk, the human figure, and the sun. Each embodies a different relationship between the physical world and our inner lives, between what we see and what we experience beyond sight. — ugo rondinone, October 2026