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Lot Essay
Feathery yellow, orange and white rings hypnotically glow in Ugo Rondinone’s towering work from 1992, one of the artist’s earliest sun paintings and a rare example of his concentric circles rendered on a square canvas; the series of dreamy, vibrating suns was begun that year. Siebzehntermärzneunzehnhundertzweiundneuzig is a luminous astral explosion, a supernova of blazing yellow and white, and like the celestial, where the stars we see are burning in the past, Rondinone’s circles are a consideration of temporality and cosmic cycles. He looks at ‘static metaphors in transition, which undermin[e] the nature of time in terms of linear progression. They elaborate an idea not as progress through time but in terms of circularity, entropy, passivity, and dreaminess. A present tense, where time has stopped and opened out to reveal suggestiveness or changelessness or hollowness’ (U. Rondinone quoted in J. Earnest, ‘Blighted Luminance’, The Brooklyn Rail, May 2013, https://brooklynrail.org/2013/05/art/blighted-luminance).
Formally, the series consciously engages with twentieth-century abstract movements, and the hazy, flat tones dialogue with the hallucinatory compositions of Op Art’s afterimages and Colour Field paintings, chromatically reminiscent of works by artists such as Kenneth Noland and Mark Rothko, who exploited the emotive power of colour. While his colours may ape the Abstract Expressionists, Rondinone rebukes the almost religious dedication to the artist’s mark his predecessors possessed. Instead, he applies his acrylic paint through a spray can, obliterating the personal trace of his hand. Furthermore, any sense of a supposed spirituality is abruptly negated by the banal, predictable titles, which refer merely to the date of the painting’s creation. Siebzehntermärzneunzehnhundertzweiundneuzig is a direct confrontation with subjective address through which Rondinone teases out figurative readings of nonrepresentational imagery. In evoking solar bodies and stellar surges, there is, the painting suggests, no such thing as a pure abstraction.
Formally, the series consciously engages with twentieth-century abstract movements, and the hazy, flat tones dialogue with the hallucinatory compositions of Op Art’s afterimages and Colour Field paintings, chromatically reminiscent of works by artists such as Kenneth Noland and Mark Rothko, who exploited the emotive power of colour. While his colours may ape the Abstract Expressionists, Rondinone rebukes the almost religious dedication to the artist’s mark his predecessors possessed. Instead, he applies his acrylic paint through a spray can, obliterating the personal trace of his hand. Furthermore, any sense of a supposed spirituality is abruptly negated by the banal, predictable titles, which refer merely to the date of the painting’s creation. Siebzehntermärzneunzehnhundertzweiundneuzig is a direct confrontation with subjective address through which Rondinone teases out figurative readings of nonrepresentational imagery. In evoking solar bodies and stellar surges, there is, the painting suggests, no such thing as a pure abstraction.