Ugo Rondinone, creator of Las Vegas’s Seven Magic Mountains, returns to the American West with more rainbows and a light touch.
Ugo Rondinone: The Rainbow Body
December 12, 2024–March 30, 2025
Aspen Art Museum
Aspen is only 105 miles from Denver as the crow—or private jet—flies, but the plebeian driving route is nearly twice as far. The press release for Ugo Rondinone’s the rainbow body at Aspen Art Museum celebrates it as the Swiss artist’s “first major institutional show in Colorado,” but I can’t shake the feeling that Aspen might as well be in the Swiss Alps, where Rondinone is from, or any other locale on the White Lotus circuit.
In the American West, Rondinone is best known for Seven Magic Mountains (2011-16), a cluster of thirty-foot-tall, Day-Glo painted cairns outside Las Vegas, Nevada. It’s one of the most ambitious land artworks in the U.S. of the past forty years, but it’s essentially a rainbow-dipped Michael Heizer: precarious precision, check; the artificial in nature, check.
Rondinone dug up the same color swatches for the rainbow body. The second floor of the museum is a fluorescent chapel, complete with a yellow vinyl floor wrap and a stained-glass rosette depicting a handless clock. Thirteen life-size, hyperrealistic wax casts of dancers lounge about, mirrored by a cluster of droopy candles in a corner.
Peering into the exhibition was like cracking a fresh box of crayons, and doffing my shoes to glide through the surreal dance studio in my socks had me momentarily giddy. The figures look incongruously grave, however, as though gathering focus in the moments before a performance.
The show’s title references a Tibetan Buddhist rite, in which the body of a devoted practitioner dissolves into light upon death. The mystical process is often described literally, and Rondinone depicts it that way, with slices missing from the figures and the clock and candles easily telegraphing temporal and bodily metaphors.
The rainbows likewise radiate simple natural and political symbolism (for more focused prismatic play, see Rondinone’s fellow LGBTQ+ artist Jeffrey Gibson [Mississippi Band Choctaw/Cherokee]), but conceptual lightness is clearly the point, and the bodies are so impeccably detailed that they hold immense intrigue. Marveling at their muscular limbs and warped feet, and instinctively mimicking their poses, was a luxurious delight.
