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Lot Essay
Since 2002, Ugo Rondinone has created several series of masks that began on the wall and later morphed into large-scale figures. The 12-part group moonrise. east are each titled january to december and represent the progress of the year, while the main title of the group refers to the rise of the moon, the start of night and the Western sky.
"The work is bound into a cosmos of nature and its temporal rhythm. The source of inspiration for the masks was not the tribal art of Black Africa, which would put Rondinone in the company of the 20th-century avant-garde. Nor do his masks relate to the Moai statues of the Easter Islands, as various authors assumed. Ugo Rondinone looked primarily at the masks of the Yupik, an Eskimo people living mainly in Alaska. Their masks made of driftwood personify spirits and are used at spiritual ceremonies with musical and dancing presentations. The Yupik masks are physical representations of meetings with the spiritual world and make the invisible visible...The surface of [Rondinone's] masks modeled in clay and cast in polyurethane has the structure of ruffled water. On closer examination this is revealed as a direct consequence of fingerprints. By means of these working traces stylized into a surface relief, the work is completely marked by the artist's personal touch, and the cultic and spiritual aspects that characterized the original masks are partly dispelled" (M. Schuppli, "The Night of Lead," Ugo Rondinone--The Night of Lead, exh. cat., 2009, pp. 330-331).
"The work is bound into a cosmos of nature and its temporal rhythm. The source of inspiration for the masks was not the tribal art of Black Africa, which would put Rondinone in the company of the 20th-century avant-garde. Nor do his masks relate to the Moai statues of the Easter Islands, as various authors assumed. Ugo Rondinone looked primarily at the masks of the Yupik, an Eskimo people living mainly in Alaska. Their masks made of driftwood personify spirits and are used at spiritual ceremonies with musical and dancing presentations. The Yupik masks are physical representations of meetings with the spiritual world and make the invisible visible...The surface of [Rondinone's] masks modeled in clay and cast in polyurethane has the structure of ruffled water. On closer examination this is revealed as a direct consequence of fingerprints. By means of these working traces stylized into a surface relief, the work is completely marked by the artist's personal touch, and the cultic and spiritual aspects that characterized the original masks are partly dispelled" (M. Schuppli, "The Night of Lead," Ugo Rondinone--The Night of Lead, exh. cat., 2009, pp. 330-331).