Ugo Rondinone, moonrise. east. april, 2005

Ugo Rondinone moonrise. east. april, 2005

Cast aluminum, brown enamel, wood plinth

187 x 105 x 110 cm (sculpture)
58 x 121,5 x 119,5 cm (plinth)
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moonrise. east. april is from a series of twelve works, one for each month, modeled in clay over styroform, cast in aluminium and painted the color of damp clay.

Each mask varies from the other, some with elongated faces or pointed chins; others are round, spherical, or oblong-shaped. Yet they also bear similar features with one another; hollow cast out spaces producing deep set eye sockets, coupled with wide gaping smiles, sometimes toothless or lined with razor sharp jagged teeth. Perhaps because of their size, the figures can exude a sense of the grotesque and ill-shapen, yet at the same time, there is almost a playful child-like innocence to these sculptures, seemingly innocuous and fantastic.

The sunrise.east series was cast in bronze and painted silver.

"The work is bound into a cosmos of nature and its temporal rhythm. The source of inspiration for the masks was not the tribal art of Black Africa, which would put Rondinone in the company of the 20th-century avant-garde. Nor do his masks relate to the Moai statues of the Easter Islands, as various authors assumed. Ugo Rondinone looked primarily at the masks of the Yupik, an indigenous people living mainly in Alaska. Their masks made of driftwood personify spirits and are used at spiritual ceremonies with musical and dancing presentations. The Yupik masks are physical representations of meetings with the spiritual world and make the invisible visible... The surface of [Rondinone's] masks modeled in clay and cast in polyurethane has the structure of ruffled water. On closer examination this is revealed as a direct consequence of fingerprints. By means of these working traces stylized into a surface relief, the work is completely marked by the artist's personal touch, and the cultic and spiritual aspects that characterized the original masks are partly dispelled"
(M. Schuppli, "The Night of Lead," Ugo Rondinone--The Night of Lead, exh. cat., 2009, pp. 330-331).
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