The exhibition of the Swiss artist based in New York, Ugo Rondinone, is conceived as a continuation of a series of international art presentations at the “Kula” Gallery. This is an artist who employs various media of artistic expression: sculpture, painting, video, photography, and others. Rondinone’s work cannot be described as entirely hermetic because he mainly operates with symbols that are understandable and previously known to everyone, regardless of their age, gender, race, or nationality. The artist’s aim is to directly engage the observer with the work, leading to various experiences and interpretative enhancements. This is also the case with his Split exhibition titled luminous light.

At the “Kula” Gallery, Rondinone presents work created specifically for this space, featuring a lightning bolt as the motif, a bifurcated composition anchored in the gallery floor, entirely covered with sand. This creates an environment that includes visual, haptic, and auditory elements in the field of experience. The momentary appearance of a lightning bolt, typically observed in the distance, is brought closer to the visitor by means of a bronze body visually accentuated with yellow colour. Rondinone’s static lightning bolt, placed amidst friable material, actually becomes a mental polygon where, on one hand, creation and destruction unite in opposition, and on the other, it prompts and recalls various belief systems in which lightning appears as a symbol of divinity, from Greek mythology to Catholicism or Hinduism. Of course, one should not overlook the thought of the primordial fear of lightning. In order to control it, it is here drawn into the enclosed late antique space in an almost animistic manner, that becomes somewhat like a cave where the ritual of worship takes place in relative safety. With this artistic intervention in Split, Ugo Rondinone, in his own way, draws attention to the uncontrolled dynamics of nature and pleads for a period of reason. Dalibor Prančević

Ugo Rondinone is recognized as one of the major voices of his generation, an artst 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, installatons, videos, and performances. His hybridized forms, which borrow from ancient and modern cultural sources alike, exude pathos and humor, going straight to the heart of the most pressing issues of our time, where modernist achievement and archaic expression intersect.

Ugo Rondinone was born in 1964 in Brunnen, Switzerland. He studied at the Universität für Angewandte Kunst in Vienna before moving to New York in 1997, where he lives and works to this day. His work has been the subject of solo presentations at the Centre George Pompidou, Paris (2003); Whitechapel Gallery ,London (2006) Art Ins5tute of Chicago (2013); Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai (2014) Palais de Tokyo, 2015, Secession, Vienna 2015, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam 2016, MACRO, Rome 2016, Carre D’Art, Nimes 2016, Berkley Art Museum, Berkeley, Contemporary Art Center Cincinnati, Cincinnati 2017, Bass Museum of Art, Miami (2017); Belvedere, Vienna (2021) Tamayo Museum, Mexico City (2022 ) and Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2022), Petit Palais, Paris (2022), Scuola Grande San Giovanni Evangelista di Venezia, Venice (2022), The Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Geneva, (2023), Storm King, New York (2023) and The Städel Museum, Frankfurt (2023). In 2007 he represented Switzerland at the 52nd Venice Biennale. Forthcoming exhibi5ons include: The Phillips Collection, Washington and Fosun Foundation, Shanghai.