Ugo Rondinone
BREATH WALK DIE
Rockbund Art Museum
2014, Sep. 13 - 2015, Jan. 4
Exhibition views Ugo Rondinone BREATHE WALK DIE, Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai
© Ugo Rondinone
Courtesy Rockbund Art Museum
The groundbreaking exhibition BREATHE WALK DIE conceived by Ugo Rondinone and curated by Larys Frogier for the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai initiates a new process into the colorful series. Ugo Rondinone considered how the straight verticality of the Rockbund Art Museum building counterbalances the infinite visual horizons paintings. The vertical architecture and horizons paintings thus combine with each other to open the rooms fully to an unlimited space in which the references to panorama and landscape are subverted as extensions rather than frontiers and boundaries.
The exhibition consists of seven layers, each a different work or group of works:
1. One new neon sign in rainbow colors will be produced as the title of the exhibition BREATHE WALK DIE.
2. Sprayed paintings fully covering the walls of the Museum, each floor showing 3 graduation of colors to progessively developing inside the architecture the full color spectrum of the rainbow.
3. A pair of clown shoes hangs at the ground floor entrance ofthe Museum.
4. A performance of 40 clowns resting in the gallery spaces, titled ‘vocabulary of solitude’.
5. Circle paintings hanging on the walls of each gallery, like setting suns on the horizon.
6. Different colored filters will cover all the windows of the foyers, distributing daylight inside the Museum with a new experience of colors.
7. The sound installation ‘dog days are over’ from 1996.
The exhibition BREATHE WALK DIE conspicuously displays the “color in excess”. This abuse of color is particularly enhanced by the presence of forty live clowns wearing multicolored costumes. Every day from, the beginning to the end of the exhibition, the performers will occupied different spots inside the museum, engaging in very strange and unexpected time-space relations with visitors. Childish, fantastic, candy-like, surreal—these could be the first impressions stemming from such an environment. But beyond this emotional and visual surface there is a deeply alienating experience which develops between the clowns and the visitors. Indeed, in the exhibition space, the clowns are not requested to actively entertain the viewers but, on the contrary, they sit and lie on the ground, sleeping and meditating, excluding themselves from the existing space and distancing themselves from the viewers. The “non-action” of the clowns’ performance infiltrates the space, reversing the colors in excess with a critical question about how to exceed norms and limits: what is the feeling of being refused? How to refuse to do what people tell you to do? How do we distribute the assumed roles and actions into our societies? It is worth noticing that each of the clowns will receive from the artist a name like a verb of action, echoing the imperative neon sign BREATHE WALK DIE. This “name-dropping” process is also another substantial element of the show: with titles and names, Rondinone powerfully acts out language beyond the limits of language.
Publication
