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Lot Essay
Ugo Rondinone’s target paintings form just one facet of his multi-faceted production, but they are intimately linked to all the other parts conceptually. Circular in format and containing hazy rings of colour that pulse in and out of the center of the composition, they suggest everything from the dazzling opticality of Op art by the likes of Wojciech Fangor, to the trance-like state of 1960s psychedelia, to the concentric circle paintings of Kenneth Noland. Beginning these works in the mid-1990s, and continuing to make them into the present, they are linked to their time through Rondinone’s use of spray paint in execution. This brings them in line with his peers, like Christopher Wool. Both artists favour the medium because of its relationship to the spontaneous, anarchic mark of the graffiti tagger, making these paintings as referential to anonymous marks on the street, and equally the high points in the history of abstract painting.
As an artist who emerged in the 1980s, Rondinone did not see a strict difference between art on the street and in the gallery, aligning him conceptually, if not formally, with artists like Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Executed on a circular canvas, Rondinone uses the pulsating action of the concentric circles in these paintings as ways to evoke abstract atmospheres, and the emotional states that arise from these. Accordingly, there is a certain intensity to NR. 293, with its white hot, sun-like center bursting outwards into a wide bright orange effulgence bordered by a tight pink-red band that steadily fades out through baby blue and white to finish in a silvery tone. The use of cool colours at the edge to frame the bright inner bands serves to intensity them, leaving after images in the eye of the viewer. Despite the experiential intensity of these works, their titles reveal the conceptual gambit that ties them, along with their irreverent intensity, with other aspects of Rondinone’s practice. In this instance simply the date of its making in German, January 7 2003, a convention which Rondinone engages across different bodies of work, giving an anonymous yet specific valence to this non-compositional painting, much as On Kawara does in the dates of his Date Paintings.
As an artist who emerged in the 1980s, Rondinone did not see a strict difference between art on the street and in the gallery, aligning him conceptually, if not formally, with artists like Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Executed on a circular canvas, Rondinone uses the pulsating action of the concentric circles in these paintings as ways to evoke abstract atmospheres, and the emotional states that arise from these. Accordingly, there is a certain intensity to NR. 293, with its white hot, sun-like center bursting outwards into a wide bright orange effulgence bordered by a tight pink-red band that steadily fades out through baby blue and white to finish in a silvery tone. The use of cool colours at the edge to frame the bright inner bands serves to intensity them, leaving after images in the eye of the viewer. Despite the experiential intensity of these works, their titles reveal the conceptual gambit that ties them, along with their irreverent intensity, with other aspects of Rondinone’s practice. In this instance simply the date of its making in German, January 7 2003, a convention which Rondinone engages across different bodies of work, giving an anonymous yet specific valence to this non-compositional painting, much as On Kawara does in the dates of his Date Paintings.