“BURN TO SHINE” Poster Image ©Museum SAN
Museum SAN presents “BURN TO SHINE,” a solo exhibition of works by Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone, on view through September 18. With over forty works of sculpture, painting, installation, and film featured in the museum’s three main galleries, as well as the Nam June Paik Hall and the outdoor stone garden, “BURN TO SHINE” offers the most comprehensive presentation of the artist’s oeuvre in Korea to date.
In contrast to the broad spectrum of medium and visual language that individual works employ, however, the exhibition, as a whole, gravitates toward themes that remain at the core of Rondinone’s artistic practice spanning over three decades – the cycle of life, and relationship to nature that fundamentally define our human condition and experience. According to the artist, “BURN TO SHINE” is a desire for transformation:
“The initial inspiration came from a poem by John Giorno titled You Got to Burn to Shine: a Buddhist proverb about the coexistence of life and death, reminiscent of the much older Greek myth of the phoenix, the immortal bird that regenerates cyclically or is reborn in a different way. Associated with the sun, the phoenix receives new life by resurrecting from the ashes of its predecessor.”
Ugo Rondinone (b. 1964, Switzerland) is recognized as one of the major voices of his generation, an artist who composes searing meditations on nature and the human condition while establishing an organic formal vocabulary that fuses a variety of sculptural and painterly traditions. The breadth and generosity of his vision of human nature have resulted in a wide range of two-dimensional and three-dimensional objects, installations, videos, and performances. Rondinone’s work has been the subject of solo presentations at the Centre Pompidou, Paris (2003); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2006); Art Institute of Chicago (2013); Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai (2014); Palais de Tokyo (2015); MACRO, Rome (2016); Carre D’Art, Nimes (2016), Berkley Art Museum, Berkeley (2017); Bass Museum of Art, Miami (2017); Belvedere, Vienna (2021); Tamayo Museum, Mexico City (2022); Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2022); Petit Palais, Paris (2022); Mus e d’Art et d’Histoire, Geneva, (2023); Storm King Art Center, New York (2023) and the St del Museum, Frankfurt (2023). In 2007, he represented Switzerland at the 52nd Venice Biennale.
