Lot 3473 - A215 Post-War & Contemporary - Thursday, 27. November 2025, 02.00 PM
UGO RONDINONE
(Brunnen 1962–lives and works in New York City)
SIEBZEHNTERMAINEUNZEHNHUNDERTNEUNUNDACHTZIG. 1991.
Ink on paper.
With the title on the original acrylic glass plaque: SIEBZEHNTERMAINEUNZEHNHUNDERTNEUNUNDACHTZIG.
156 × 260 cm.
In the artist's original wooden frame.
In the artist's original wooden frame.
Provenance:
- Private collection, Switzerland (acquired from the above in 1991).
With his drawings of forests, Ugo Rondinone continues a long tradition of romantic landscape depictions in which nature is understood not as a mere image, but as a mirror of innermost feelings. Rondinone takes historical landscape motifs, restages them on a large scale and translates them into a contemporary visual language. Using black ink, he develops a vibrant structure of trunks and branches, which in their density and precision are reminiscent of both Johann Christian Reinhart's filigree depictions of forests and Carl Wilhelm Kolbe's fantastically exaggerated tree creatures. The forest appears, not as a realistically observed landscape, but as an imagined, intensified space. The feelings of menace and security are intertwined here, an ambivalence that Rondinone further reinforces through striking contrasts of light and dark. The large format gives the seemingly classic subject an unfamiliar presence that directly involves the viewer in the scene. The date written out in the title of the work refers to exactly when it was created and lends the drawing a diary-like quality. The forest thus becomes a reflection of Rondinone's inner world, in which nature and artist inevitably merge.
CHF 60 000 / 90 000 | (€ 61 860 / 92 780)
Sold for CHF 68 750 (including buyer's premium)