Ugo Rondinone (B. 1964)

With its carefully-measured horizontal bands of flat colour spanning four metres in width, Ugo Rondinone’s No. 239 dreissigsterjunizweitausendundnull is a monumental work from his series of striped abstract panoramas. Closely related to the artist’s celebrated ‘target’ paintings, these works occupy a central position in Rondinone’s diverse multimedia practice. Casting a hypnotic spell over the viewer, their mesmerizing surfaces exemplify the explorations of subjective experience that, since the 1990s, have propelled the artist to critical acclaim. Created largely during the early 2000s, they operate in dialogue with the transcendental aspirations of the so-called ‘abstract sublime’ as espoused by the 1960s Colour Field painters: whilst their trance-like bands of colour initially seem to invoke a state of meditative calm, their flat surfaces and clinical application of paint ultimately resist any promise of spiritual fulfilment. In addition, by titling each work after the date of its completion, Rondinone grounds his work in the banality of daily existence: his creations are not vehicles for sublimation, but rather objects that testify to the quotidian passage of time. As the artist explains, ‘I understand art as essentially static, which creates its own artificial gravity system, where the work states its own void or abyss’ (U. Rondinone, quoted in Ugo Rondinone: How Does It Feel?, exh. cat., Le Centquatre, Paris, 2009, p. 52). Drawing the viewer into its depths, only to repel their gaze, No. 239 dreissigsterjunizweitausendundnull bears witness to this very condition.