U G O  R O N D I N O N E

wind moon

Cast aluminum, white enamel

600 x 520 x 460 cm

Executed in 2011

A B O U T   T H E   A R T I S T

Ugo Rondinone (born 1964) is a Swiss-born mixed-media artist living and working in New York. His practice spans sculpture, painting, installation, and film, and draws inspiration from nature, spirituality and the everyday to create playful works that blur the boundary between fiction and reality.

A B O U T   T H E   A R T W O R K

wind moon is a spectral, bone-white aluminium sculpture, cast by Rondinone from a 2,000-year-old olive tree in Southern Italy. The tensions between reality and surreality, poetry and industry, naturalism and artifice are always present in Rondinone’s work, and wind moon seeks to reconcile these realms; at once industrial in its materiality, natural in its subject matter, and otherworldly in its ghostly enamelled colour. Rondinone reinvents the world poetically, making trees to populate a dreamscape. Placed outdoors amongst real nature at The Scandinavian, this work – an aluminium tree cast from a real one – raises questions about concepts of time and displacement, and about the relationship between natural and artificial environments. The cast gnarled branches and twisting trunk, weathered by 2,000 years, transport the viewer back to a more archaic time of Earth rituals and Pagan worship of the stars, when Man was connected to Nature and ruled by the Earth’s cycles, rather than attempting to combat and overcome them.  wind moon is a kind of portal, a time-traveller in an aluminium shell, evoking past societies and imaginary worlds.