Ugo Rondinone - Contemporary Art Evening Sale London Sunday, June 26, 2011 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Almine Rech Gallery, Paris

  • Exhibited

    New York, Ritz Carlton Plaza, Battery Park, Art on the Plaza, 21 January–30 April 2007 (another example exhibited); Venice, Church San Stae, Swiss Pavilion, 52nd Venice Biennale, get up girl a sun is running the world (with Urs Fischer), 2007 (another example exhibited)

  • Catalogue Essay

    “What interests me about the 2000-year-old olive trees is the fact that once they are cast bare naked they become a memoriam of condensed time. Through a cast olive tree you can not only experience the lapse of real time, that is lived time, frozen in its given form, but through this transformation also a different calibrated temporality. Time can be experienced as a lived abstraction, where the shape is formed by this accumulation of time and wind force. If my work in general has a nonlinear approach to the world, then the system and concept of time, which has occupied my work since the beginning, gives me a certain sense of grounding.” (Ugo Rondinone, from a press release for Creative Time’s project, Art on the Plaza: air gets into everything even nothing & get up girl a sun is running the world, New York, 2007) The present lot, Get up girl a sun is running the world from 2006, is a representation of a 2,000-year-old olive tree, like the ones found in the countryside outside Naples, the hometown of Rondinone’s parents. The sculpture has been cast in aluminium from an ancient olive tree, then coated in white enamel and set within an urban context. There is an inevitable contrast between the artificial and the natural in a lifeless sculpture being derived so directly from a living organism. The tree’s gnarled trunk and bare branches, beautifully sculpted by the forces of nature over the course of two millennia, inevitably suggest life, death and the passage of time. The tree, frozen in aluminium and painted in stark white and set within an unnatural environment of concrete and glass, also has an air of other-worldliness. Through this, Rondinone explores the nexus between dream, fiction and reality. His contemplation of existence in these terms is always tinged with a poetic melancholia – as early as 1991, he had begun representing a nostalgic Arcadian ideal in a series of monumental Indian-ink drawings depicting the woods, hills, streams and cottages of a pre-modern world, their simple beauty conjuring up a lost innocence. This existential exercise is taken further in Rondinone’s trees which, while appearing to arrest the passage of time, in fact reflect upon our transience.

4

Get up girl a sun is running the world

2006
Cast aluminium, white enamel.
457 × 396 × 396 cm (179 7/8 × 155 7/8 × 155 7/8 in).
This work is from an edition of 3 plus 1 artist’s proofs and is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity.

Estimate
£200,000 - 300,000 

Sold for £541,250

Contemporary Art Evening Sale

27 June
London