Ugo Rondinone: the shape of silence @ Kiyomizu-dera Joju-in
Ugo Rondinone's first solo exhibition in Japan opens at Kiyomizu-dera Joju-in, featuring 17 stone figures, a sun painting, and a monk sculpture.Summary
Sadie Coles HQ, a contemporary art gallery founded in 1997 with three spaces in London's West End, presents Ugo Rondinone's first solo exhibition in Japan, "the shape of silence," at Joju-in, Kiyomizu-dera in Kyoto, from October 27 to November 12, 2026. Born in 1964 in Brunnen, Switzerland, Rondinone graduated from the University of Applied Arts Vienna and moved to New York in 1997, where he still lives and works. Throughout his career, he has approached nature not merely as landscape but as a spiritual state, exploring our existence within the body, consciousness, and vast time and space. The exhibition features 17 stone figures, a painting of the sun, and a monk sculpture. The stone figures evoke Inuit inuksuit, and this motif is personally meaningful to Rondinone, whose father was a stonemason. The sun painting, expanding in concentric circles of red and black, is set in the tokonoma alcove, while the monk sculpture stands at the foot of the temple's historic Sai-mon gate, beside the statue of the Blue Dragon. The sun and meditating figures are recurring motifs in Rondinone's "Sun" and "Monk" series, functioning as symbols of spiritual transcendence. At Kiyomizu-dera, where religious practice, architecture, and natural landscape have overlapped for centuries, the exhibition invites reflection on how humans live within nature.
(Source：ART iT)