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Institute of Contemporary Art
100 Northern Avenue
617-478-3100
Boston
Sandra and Gerald Fineberg
Art Wall
Ugo Rondinone
October 28, 2008-
November 1, 2009

Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone will create the third installation of the Sandra and Gerald Fineberg Art Wall at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston. The Art Wall is dedicated to site-specific works by leading contemporary artists, commissioned annually. Located along the eastern interior wall of the museum’s glass-enclosed lobby, the most public space in the museum, the Art Wall is the visitor’s first encounter with art work on entering the building.

First introduced to Boston in the ICA’s inaugural exhibition Super Vision (2006), Rondinone has earned international attention for his poetic, evocative work across a wide range of styles and media. He tends to work in series, selecting a medium and motif that he explores in multiple variations. His best known groups of works include monochromatic large-scale drawings of trees, multi-colored concentric circle paintings, sculptures of recumbent clowns or gnarly olive trees, and rainbow-colored neon signs. Among his titles are Two Stones in my Pocket, House of Dust, Cry me a River, Moonlight and Aspirin, and A Horse with No Name. These poetic evocations are often suggestive of the passing of time, of introspective moods and of charged atmospheres.

“Ugo Rondinone’s installations create a dramatic, sensory environment where imagination and reality seem to co-exist,” says Jill Medvedow, Director of the Institute of Contemporary Art. “It is fitting for the Sandra and Gerald Fineberg Art Wall, where visitors begin their experience at the ICA.”

“Rondinone transforms objects and spaces in order to trigger both distant memories and fresh speculations. His choices of materials and imagery are often enigmatic, but also deeply personal, related to specific moments, places, and relationships,” says Nicholas Baume, ICA Chief Curator.

At the ICA, Rondinone will enliven the Fineberg Art Wall with a dynamic new installation, covering the wall with 52 mirrored glass windows in a rainbow of colors and variety of sizes, and set against a backdrop of whitewashed sheets from local newspapers. The window frames will be fashioned out of recycled barn wood painted gray, contrasting with the sleekness of the mirrored glass window panes. Entitled Clockwork for Oracles, the title for the project is taken from a poem by Edmond Jabès.

Based in New Rork, Ugo Rondinone was born in 1963 in Brunnen, Switzerland. He has exhibited widely in Europe and the United States, and was the representative for Switzerland in the 52nd Venice Biennale (2007). Solo exhibitions include a public installation in New York’s Battery Park (2007); Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2003); and P.S.1, Long Island City, New York (2000). Rondinone’s sign project Hell, Yes! (2001), is currently installed on the New Museum’s Bowery building façade.

Institute of Contemporary Art
100 Northern Avenue
617-478-3100
Boston
Tara Donovan
October 10, 2008-
January 4, 2009

The first museum survey of American sculptor Tara Donovan opens this fall at The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston. Featuring 17 sculptures and installations from the past decade—including a new work commissioned by the ICA — Tara Donovan traces the ambitious process of this ingenious young artist. With acute awareness of the aesthetic properties of her materials, Donovan explores how mass quantities of everyday items — tape, plastic cups, toothpicks, buttons —can transcend the familiar to create stunning, almost otherworldly, sculptural forms.

"This groundbreaking exhibition of Tara Donovan's sculpture is a timely opportunity to experience Donovan's evolution as an artist and bring needed scholarship to her artistic practice," says Jill Medvedow, Director of The Institute of Contemporary Art.

"Donovan has an exceptional understanding of how individual items can confound and astound when configured en masse," according to the ICA's Nicholas Baume and Jen Mergel, co-curators of the exhibition. "She installs her configurations with great sensitivity to the fusion between material, light and architecture, achieving effects that approach the sublime."

Mirroring nature's own process, Donovan arranges simple parts into complex wholes-evoking endless possibilities of reproduction and growth. Nebulous — a 20-foot installation formed from thousands of looped rounds of Scotch tape — appears like a soft mist emerging from the gallery floor. Highly attuned to the aesthetic potential of her material, Donovan draws our attention to the subtle purple hue that emerges when light moves upon the airy, irregular form, creating interwoven patches of translucency and color within the installation.

In Haze, Donovan stacks millions of clear drinking straws against the full length of a gallery wall in what resembles a hazy blur or rolling fog bank. The straws appear as a solid atmospheric plane as light filters through the holes of each tiny plastic tube. Framed only by the walls that surround it, the work suggests boundless possibilities for the sculptural form.

From toothpick cubes to Mylar constellations, Donovan's abstractions combine contradictory properties in commonplace materials — the manufactured and the natural, the familiar and the otherworldly — to unexpected effect. As artist Chuck Close was recently quoted in Vogue as saying, "[Tara's] material never stops being what it is, and yet it builds into an amazing apparition."

Born in 1969 in New York, NY, Tara Donovan has had solo exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY (2007), the Saint Louis Art Museum, Saint Louis, MO (2006), and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA (2004), amongst others. Her work was featured in the 2000 Whitney Biennial and she was the recipient of the Alexander Calder Foundation's first annual Calder Prize in 2005.  Donovan received her MFA in Sculpture from Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA (1999). She lives and works in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Following the ICA, Tara Donovan travels to the Lois & Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art, Cincinnati (Feb. 7-May 11, 2009), the Des Moines Arts Center (June 19-Sept. 13, 2009) and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (Oct. 10, 2009-Jan. 16, 2010).

The ICA exhibition coincides with the publication of Tara Donovan, a comprehensive 160-page monograph co-published by The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, and The Monacelli Press/Random House, New York. Contents include an introductory essay by ICA associate curator Jen Mergel and ICA chief curator Nicholas Baume; a conversation between Tara Donovan and Lawrence Weschler; an afterword by ICA director Jill Medvedow, and approximately 70 reproductions of all Donovan's works to date.