Ugo Rondinone The assertive, 2025

The sculpture is made of hewn bluestone. Six blocks have been stacked atop one another to form the basic shape of a human body—legs, waist, torso, and head. The stones, whose rough edges result of the quarry work, have not been modified.

The sculpture is part of body of work initiated by Ugo Rondinone in 2013 with Human Nature: nine monumental sculptures installed on the Rockefeller Plaza in New York, as part of the Public Art Fund project. In a further development, the artist created smaller iterations of the same motif. Both the uniqueness and the rough, hand-made character of this series of sculptures are further emphasized by the titles given to individual works. These titles, functioning rather more like evocative names, refer to feelings: “the sprightly”, “the keen”, “the thankful”, “the shocked”, “the surprised” …