Ugo Rondinone

Ugo Rondinone was born in Brunnen, Switzerland, to Italian parents, with sources citing either 1964 or, less often, 1962 as his birth year. He studied at the Hochschule fur Angewandte Kunst in Vienna, now the University of Applied Arts Vienna, from 1986 to 1990, where his teachers included the sculptor Bruno Gironcoli and the artist Ernst Caramelle. He received the Swiss Eidgenossischer Preis fur freie Kunst, the Swiss Federal Art Award, three times, in 1991, 1994, and 1995. He moved to New York in 1997 and has lived and worked there since.

His institutional profile grew steadily through the 2000s, with solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Vienna in 2002, the Centre Pompidou in 2003, and the Whitechapel Gallery in 2006, followed by his representation of Switzerland at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007. Further solo shows followed at the Hayward Gallery and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, in 2008, and at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in 2009. His public sculpture Human Nature, nine colossal stone figures installed at Rockefeller Plaza in 2013, and Seven Magic Mountains, unveiled near Las Vegas in 2016, brought his work to a much wider public audience.

More recently, Rondinone has continued a dense schedule of institutional exhibitions, including his first major German survey at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt in 2022 and a presentation at Storm King Art Center in 2023. He was named the 2024 mentor for Reiffers Art Initiatives. As of mid-2026 he continues to exhibit actively, with a show at the K21 in Dusseldorf running into April 2026 and a new project, More Light, opening at Sadie Coles HQ in London in June 2026.

Coverage of Rondinone in the art press tends to frame him as an artist whose practice bridges land art, Pop color, and a personal, often melancholic sense of time and nature. His 2022 exhibition cycle, spanning Kukje Gallery in Seoul and Busan, Frieze Sculpture in London, and a video and installation show at the Petit Palais in Paris, was widely described as one of his most visible years, coinciding with monumental installations at Manifesta 14 in Kosovo and strong sales at art fairs and auction. Curators of the Petit Palais exhibition, writing about his work in the press, emphasized the long arc of his practice and its accumulated density, a theme that recurs across writing on his career: a body of work built less around a single signature image than around a sustained, decades-long meditation on color, geologic scale, and solitude.

Rondinone's recorded auction high is A day like this made of nothing and nothing else (2009), a sculpture that sold for USD 1,131,000 at Sotheby's on 15 November 2018, the highest price yet reported for one of his sculptures. Market trackers place his broader realized-price range up to roughly USD 1.13 million for sculpture and roughly USD 504,500 for painting, reflecting a market where large sculptural works command a meaningful premium over works on paper or canvas. Public reporting from 2022 also noted that sales of his paintings at auction that year, including a sun painting that sold for USD 390,600, consistently exceeded pre-sale high estimates.

Public sources disagree on Rondinone's exact birth year, citing either 1964 or 1962, and no source gives a full birth date, so any precise age calculation should be treated with caution. No published catalogue raisonne has been identified for the artist, and authentication in practice runs through his network of representing galleries rather than a single authenticating body. His auction record is anchored by one high-value sculpture sale in 2018, and reported price ranges suggest sculpture and painting trade in materially different bands, so collectors should look closely at medium, scale, and date when comparing any two results rather than treating his market as a single uniform curve.