MOONRISE. west. june - © Galerie des Galeries
MOONRISE. west. june, 2004

Black polyurethane cast
Collection Ginette Moulin / Guillaume Houzé, Paris
Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zürich et Almine Rech, Paris - Bruxelles
© Photo: Stefan Altenburger Photography, Zürich.


Still fresh in people’s memories is the series of twelve monumental bronze statues with a silvery patina that were shown two years ago in the Tuileries Garden as part of the Autumn Festival. As with Moonrise. west. june, Rondinone’s Sunrise. west. march is part of a series devoted to the solar calendar. And like the former, the latter piece looks like a child’s attempt to model clay, revealing beneath its polished aluminum surface traces of a spatula and prints left by the fingers that once worked the material. Finally, like Moonrise, the Sunrise piece expresses the influence of the stars on the psyche.

The Moonrise masks are forerunners of the series of giants created by Ugo Rondinone in 2006, twelve sculptures each of which bears the name of a month of the year. An allusion to the passage of time and its eternal repetition, the masks form a cycle of figures with a wonderful range of expressions, from sadness to joy through a series of mysterious smiles. They are part of the history of art, following in the wake of ancient Greek, African and Japanese masks, and, like them, they embody the link between humans and the nonhuman, be it nature, the gods, or death.

From the same artist

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