Pat Steir, Ugo Rondinone

The imposing installation "Waterfalls & Clouds" consists of three sculptures by the Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone (b. Brunnen, Switzerland, 1964; lives and works in New York) and nineteen paintings by the American Pat Steir (b. Newark, NJ, 1940; lives and works in New York). The three large gray monoliths of concrete, sand, and gravel bear the titles "Faces", "Look", and "Twisted" and are part of a series of twenty works created in 2018. They are surrounded by nineteen tall and narrow black oil paintings titled "Flags for Ugo" #1 through #19 (2021); with colorful or white paint streaming down the canvases, they hark back to Steir's Waterfall series from the 1980s. A symbiotic relationship connects the works: the sculptures, in which erosion is integral to the art, embody time, while the pictures symbolize gravity and hence nature as such.