Ugo Rondinone: Hell, Yes!

Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone has spent the last twenty years working in a diverse range of mediums, including painting, drawing, photography, video, installation, and sculpture. Whether trance-inducing mandala paintings, large-scale drawings from nature, or moody multi-channel video environments, R... Read more

Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone has spent the last twenty years working in a diverse range of mediums, including painting, drawing, photography, video, installation, and sculpture. Whether trance-inducing mandala paintings, large-scale drawings from nature, or moody multi-channel video environments, Rondinone’s work explores notions of emotional and psychic profundity found in the most banal elements of everyday life.

Since 1997, Rondinone has included the practice of making signs in his varied oeuvre. He takes phrases from pop songs and everyday exclamations and makes them into rainbow-hued, neon-lit sculptures that are joyous affirmations of love and life. For the opening of the New Museum at 235 Bowery, Rondinone will reprise his 2001 work Hell, Yes! The installation encapsulates the philosophy of openness, fearlessness, and optimism that surrounds the New Museum’s reemergence in the contemporary art community, as well as its history as the home of socially committed contemporary art.