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Lot Essay
A monumental paean to passing time, Get up girl a sun is running the world unites the key autobiographical and philosophical preoccupations that thread throughout Ugo Rondinone’s visually and conceptually arresting body of work. Executed in 2006, the year that Rondinone had a major solo show at London’s Whitechapel Gallery, this edition has been exhibited as part of “Art on the Plaza 6” in New York’s Battery Park, as well as at the Venice Biennale in 2007, where Rondinone represented Switzerland.
Four years before the present work was made, the Swiss-born, US-based artist purchased an olive orchard in the Southern Italian countryside, close to the city of Matera, where his father was raised. Between 2006 and 2009, he made rubber molds from six of these trees—some of which were 2000 years old and still bearing olives—which were then cast in aluminum and painted in matt white enamel paint.
The remarkable life-size sculptures capture the wonder of the tree’s ancient forms, shaped by natural forces over thousands of years. As Rondinone explains, “Through a cast olive tree you can not only experience the lapse of real-time, that is lived time, frozen in its given form, but through this transformation also a different calibrated temporality. Time can be experienced as a lived abstraction, where the shape is formed by the accumulation of time and wind force” (U. Rondinone, quoted at “Sculpture in the City”, 2011, online [accessed: 4/8/2025]).
Nature has been a fundamental motif in Rondinone’s work since the late 1980s. “In the middle of the AIDS crisis at the end of 1988,” he has explained, “I turned away from grief and found a spiritual roadmap for solace, regeneration and inspiration in nature. In nature, you enter a space where the sacred and profane, the mystical and the mundane, vibrate against one another. This new base found in nature would inform my work for the next thirty-three years” (U. Rondinone, quoted in “Ugo Rondinone on Art, Life & Everything In Between”, Artspace, August 11 2022).
Four years before the present work was made, the Swiss-born, US-based artist purchased an olive orchard in the Southern Italian countryside, close to the city of Matera, where his father was raised. Between 2006 and 2009, he made rubber molds from six of these trees—some of which were 2000 years old and still bearing olives—which were then cast in aluminum and painted in matt white enamel paint.
The remarkable life-size sculptures capture the wonder of the tree’s ancient forms, shaped by natural forces over thousands of years. As Rondinone explains, “Through a cast olive tree you can not only experience the lapse of real-time, that is lived time, frozen in its given form, but through this transformation also a different calibrated temporality. Time can be experienced as a lived abstraction, where the shape is formed by the accumulation of time and wind force” (U. Rondinone, quoted at “Sculpture in the City”, 2011, online [accessed: 4/8/2025]).
Nature has been a fundamental motif in Rondinone’s work since the late 1980s. “In the middle of the AIDS crisis at the end of 1988,” he has explained, “I turned away from grief and found a spiritual roadmap for solace, regeneration and inspiration in nature. In nature, you enter a space where the sacred and profane, the mystical and the mundane, vibrate against one another. This new base found in nature would inform my work for the next thirty-three years” (U. Rondinone, quoted in “Ugo Rondinone on Art, Life & Everything In Between”, Artspace, August 11 2022).