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Renowned Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone’s colorful large-scale, public artwork Seven Magic Mountains is an exhibition located in the desert outside of Las Vegas, Nevada, featuring seven, 30 to 35-feet high dayglow totems comprised of painted, locally-sourced boulders.
Ugo Rondinone, born 1964 in Brunnen, Switzerland, lives and works in New York and has long embraced a fluid range of forms and media. By allowing himself such formal, Rondinone creates the conditions for an expansive emotional range. His work has become recognized for its ability to channel both psychological expressiveness and profound insight in the human condition and the relationship between human being and nature. Referring concurrently to the natural world, romanticism and existentialism, his works encapsulate a “mental trinity” that has underpinned his art for more than twenty years.
As artists are sometimes forced to do, Ugo Rondinone has tried to explain in human language the intent of his work. He says, “Seven Magic Mountains elicits continuities and solidarities between human and nature, artificial and natural, then and now.”
Here’s what Seven Magic Mountains really is: It’s an eye-popping jolt of color in an otherwise bleak landscape.
Seven Magic Mountains is a clever take on a practice that’s taken off in recent years, rock stacking or balancing. It’s part art, part discipline, and its practitioners say rock balancing has a calming effect.
Beyond its scale, Seven Magic Mountains differs from traditional rock balancing in that it uses an inner support structure, presumably to help it withstand the desert’s high winds.
What Seven Magic Mountains does have in common with rock balancing is it is almost certain to spark controversy. Many say they want to experience nature in its “undisturbed state.” Those who dislike rock balancing are pretty much guaranteed to have their heads explode at the sight of the fluorescent Seven Magic Mountains. It’s jarring. It’s disruptive. And that’s what’s great about it. It’s nature, but amplified.
AKO - learn
AKO - learn
Thinking and Reflecting
Thinking and Reflecting
Do some simple research on your artist and their style of work. Use the google slides template provided in google classroom
Gemma Smith
Australian Sculptor
EMILY FLOYD
Working in sculpture, printmaking and public installation, Emily Floyd is renowned for her text-based sculptures and pedagogically inspired works that combine a strong focus on visual qualities with an interest in the legacies of modernism
Ian Williams
Leigh Schoenheimer
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