Ugo Rondinone - Contemporary Art Evening Sale London Wednesday, February 27, 2008 | Phillips

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  • Provenance






    Galerie Hauser & Wirth, Zurich

  • Catalogue Essay


    Rondinone’s paintings are markers for all those who don’t want to deny the potential of flat colour on canvas but also don’t want to get involved in masochistic systems without at least knowing what’s pinning them in the corner. The painted work sits within his practice as a powerful reminder that those whose primary practice doesn’t include painting might still want to be part of an inclusive dialogue around the potential of inter-art discourse now. They might not want to leave coquettish assertion to others.
    Rondinone’s paintings are marked with ambiguity, something that heightens and reduces their potential significance. Dates are used as titles – strung together into one long German compound word that might stand for a moment of focus within the elegant and frequently enigmatic collapse that forms his practice. Aesthetic mood swings and complication punctuated by circles and stripes of blurred paint. Here painting does not attempt to stand for all experience or ultra-subjectivity but is reductive without being formalist in a pure sense. A title may be a moment of commencement or completion. Or a reminder of one day removed from the rest, one day where things worked out well. A registration and acknowledgement that, in lieu of other ideas, today remains a day for something. A time to produce a strangely reduced excess of beauty. At all points we are dealing with elegant contradiction. Of intentions and results, of ideology and self-construction. L. Gillick, ‘Profile: Ugo Rondinone’ in Contemporary Magazine, London, 2006
     
     

120

No. 89 ACHTERMAERZNEUNZEHNHUNDERTSIEBENUNDNEUNZIG

1997
Acrylic on canvas.
Diameter: 220 cm. (86 5/8 in).
Signed, titled and dated ‘Ugo Rondinone No. 89 1997’ on the stretcher bar.

Estimate
£60,000 - 80,000 

Sold for £90,500

Contemporary Art Evening Sale

28 Feb 2008, 7pm
London