For its third carte blanche XL exhibition, the MAH invites Ugo Rondinone (1964-) to take over its collection and its main building to create a unique aesthetic experience. More than 200 pieces from the MAH’s collection will be used and staged in a continuous dialogue with Ugo Rondinone’s works, including new productions created especially for the occasion. Considered one of the major voices of his generation, Rondinone is an artist who composes searing meditations on nature and the human condition.

FOCUS ON A WORK

RHYTHMIC SPACE. OPEN SKY

the horizons (2020) by Rondinone respond here to Hodler’s paintings of Lake Geneva and Lake Thun.

Here again, the networks of echoes and contrasts dominate the visitor’s perception. However, these animal silhouettes are embodied here in a crafted and artificially created material, glass, thus reflecting another alchemy: the conversion of a natural universe into pigments on a canvas, through the magic of the painter’s eye.

Beyond this dialectic which unites the artificial and the natural, a strong symbolic dimension is added by the fact that each of the glass horses is also the receptacle of water and air coming from different seas of the world; the immensity invites itself in the form, the unlimited in the limit.

Finally, the surface of the water in Rondinone’s horses represents the demarcation of the sky and the sea, according to a play of contrasts between the aquatic and the aerial that we also find in Hodler’s chromaticism. From pigment to mineral, from canvas to sculpture, from lake to sea, a fascinating game of back and forth is created that enchants the eye and thatLove Invents Us (1999) tints this time with yellow.