Ugo Rondinone (born 1964, in Brunnen, Switzerland) studied at the University of Applied Arts Vienna (in Austria) from 1986 to 1990. Rondinone works with various media, such as photography, video, sculpture, painting, installation art, and prints, and often appropriates phrases from literature and popular culture for his art. Many of his works involve the use of signage – like his rainbow-colored sculpture Hell, Yes! (2001), which long adorned the facade of the New Museum in New York – while other of his works tend to coax the viewer into a meditative state. His work is tinged with melancholy, as he connects the beautiful with the strange, and the clumsy with the naked truth. Ugo Rondinone seems intent on using dissimulation to better reveal reality, as to mask it, and to exaggerate its features, which is a means of revealing human nature. Behind his art, there are Bosch and the Romantics, as well as a disenchanted and skeptical gaze on the world. And yet at the same time, Rondinone shows us possibilities in the making, as well as humor – and what could be better than humor during times of adversity?

“ I always take one work from the previous show and give it a new setting in the new show... just to have a thread for myself... so that it becomes like a book. „

—Ugo Rondinone