Matthew Marks is pleased to announce an exhibition of new sculpture and painting by Ugo Rondinone. This will be the artist’s fifth exhibition at Matthew Marks Gallery.

The exhibition consists of twelve new sculptures shown here for the first time. Each measuring nearly nine feet tall and named after a month of the year, these new works are the artist’s first freestanding figurative sculptures. Modeled in clay, then cast in aluminum and painted, the hand of the artist is felt strongly throughout. These sculptures are the fourth and final group in Rondinone’s series of mask sculptures, which he calls Moonrise.

Additional works in the exhibition include a group of new small-scale paintings, in graphite and white gesso on linen, depicting windows seen in different cities during the artist’s travels, as well as a variety of quotidian objects found in his studio. Rondinone calls these works “date paintings” and-like his earlier target paintings, stripe paintings, and landscape drawings-titles each with the date the work was completed, much like a diary entry. The paintings will be installed, together with new poem drawings on newsprint, as a sparse horizon around the walls of the gallery, the finely drawn works standing in marked contrast to the massive forms of the sculptures.

These works will be accompanied by an additional sculpture, a metal keyhole, seemingly from an over-sized, old door, set into the wall, out of which blows a current of warm air.

Ugo Rondinone was born in Switzerland in 1964. This summer he is one of four artists representing Switzerland at the 52nd Venice Biennale. His work was included in the 2004 Carnegie International in Pittsburgh, and in the past five years he has had one-person museum exhibitions at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Kunsthalle, Vienna; the Kunstverein, Stuttgart; the Galleria Civica, Modena; the Museum for Contemporary Art, Sydney; and Le Consortium in Dijon; among others. In September of this year “The Third Mind”, a large exhibition curated by Ugo Rondinone, will open at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris.