Ugo Rondinone brilliant light, 2023

brilliant light is a bronze sculpture painted in bright, dayglo yellow, depicting a bolt of lightning. The larger lightning sculptures were presented at the artist's solo exhibition cry me a river at Kunstmuseum Luzern in 2024.

The sculpture represents the crooked and rhythmic lines that form strikes of lightning, creating a tangible and static representation of these miraculous experiences and awe-inspiring phenomena. As the viewer moves around the sculpture, its form continuously changes based on the viewer’s vantage point.

Rondinone’s examination of nature through painting, drawing, and sculpture alludes to deep, conceptual conversations surrounding the ways in which humans connect to their environments and the elements that comprise them. Lightning bolts, which we ordinarily experience as flashes of light in a storm, also connect to Rondinone’s interest in the earthly realm and the sublime, as seen in German Romanticism and the works of Caspar David Friedrich, whom he has often made references to in his practice. Lightning forms a bridge between the earthly realm and the divine, suggesting the possibility of transcending the physical world and everyday life. Rondinone's light sculptures further recall other natural forms in our everyday life, including inverted branches or the roots of a tree. As such, Rondinone places the quotidian as nothing short of extraordinary. As with the artist’s colored mountain and nuns + monks sculptures, which similarly feature forms of nature painted in bright neon colors, the vivid, artificial coloration of these works creates a stunning contrast and serves to evoke an altogether contemporary version of the sublime.