Ugo Rondinone, Joel Shapiro & Michael Craig-Martin.

Masters of Contemporary Sculpture

May 15, 2024 - July 28, 2024

Stockholm

Carling Dalenson is pleased to announce “Masters of Contemporary Sculpture” an exhibition of sculptures by artists Ugo Rondinone, Joel Shapiro and Michael Craig-Martin.

Carling Dalenson Gallery in Stockholm has established itself as one of the foremost contemporary art galleries in Northern Europe, and have taken great pride to be able to have some of the greatest living artist visiting Stockholm during their exhibitions here. One result of this is that we are now able to have three of the most successful and innovative contemporary sculptors visiting for a joint exhibition starting May 15th, namely Ugo Rondinone, Joel Shapiro and Michael Craig-Martin.

The exhibition "Masters of Contemporary Sculpture”, consists of 8 individual sculptures in different materials (powder-coated Steel, painted Bronze and painted Wood) with a language form recognized individually for the artists. All three distinctly evoking our senses by confronting the viewers  relationship to space, scale and gravity, as well as psychologically and physically exploring the concept of our comprehension of figure, color, form and shape. Further, Ugo Rondinone, Michael Craig-Martin and Joel Shapiro configurate this through their own unique expressions and dispositions, with their particularly playful yet carefully structured and extraordinary craftmanship, and their bona fide precision.

In Ugo Rondinones case the exhibition is the first in Sweden and almost coincides with two institutional exhibitions in Sweden, The Borås Art Biennal opening on June 15th and the Pilane sculpture Park on on Tjörn Island opening on May 18th, 2025. Joel Shapiro and Michael Craig-Martin have had institutional and gallery exhibitions in the last 40 years in Denmark and Sweden Lousiana Museum, Moderna Museet among other venues.

UGO RONDINONE

Ugo Rondinone (born 1964 in Brunnen, Switzerland)  is recognized as one of the major voices of his generation, and has for nearly forty years made visually stunning work that invites the viewer to renew their senses. 

His artworks are meditations on the world and everyday life, that reflect particularly on the theme of time and serves as a testimony and a balm to those who may be grieving the impermanence of things. Furthermore, Rondinone’s eclectic practice often explores the relationships between opposing forces—day and night, real and artificial, euphoria and depression. 

The breadth of his vision of human nature have resulted in a wide range of two and three-dimensional objects, installations, videos, and performances. His hybridized forms, which borrow from ancient and modern cultural sources alike, exude pathos and humor, going straight to the heart of the most pressing issues of our time.

Rather than making art that is intellectually complex Rondinone works with basic familiar imagery.  

For the exhibition at Carling Dalenson Gallery in Stockholm, which will be his first time exhibiting in Sweden, Rondione will present a selection of his painted bronze sculptures, “Nuns" and “Monks”. 

Earlier works from this series consisted of larger-than-life figures that stood massively tall and made of bronze. Here, however, Rondinone has turned his attention to smaller sculptural forms, which appear as votive objects created for solitary connection and prayer.

Evoking the mystery and gravity of a holy person, the Nuns and Monks possess and animate the space; anthropomorphic sculptures consisting of two distinctly painted parts, a single large monolithic stone capped with a smaller headstone, each figure exudes a distinct personality.

The “Nuns" and “Monks” addresses the dual reflection between the inner self and the natural world and have an undeniable presence, both as individuals and in carefully constructed groupings. Here, the viewer is able to approach each sacred personage and form a significant, singular bond with each figure encountered. But rather than feel weighed down by this iconic symbolism, these mythic beings towering above the viewer remain open and welcoming, their rough-hewn surfaces evoking not brittle dogma but the billowing garments of a healer. 

These precious and intimately-sized works demonstrate the care and precision in Rondinone’s hand, having been carved from limestone. 

Stone's ability to both retain and radiate time and the overall power embedded in stone has been a focus of Rondinone for nearly a decade and a recurring material and symbol in Rondinone’s art.

Straddling the divide between gallery and public art, Rondinone has produced numerous large scale artworks for public spaces in cities across the globe. Among these have been Human Nature, a monumental set of stone-henge like figures commissioned for the Rockefeller Plaza by New York's Public Art Fund; the massive, Seven Magic Mountains work in the Nevada desert near Las Vegas, commissioned by the Public Art Production Fund and Nevada Museum Of Art; And The Sun, a massive ring made from golden tree trunks temporarily installed in the gardens of the Palace of Versailles in France.

Rondinone's work is held in the collections of: The Bass Museum of Art, Miami; Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Rome, Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich, Musée d'Art Contemporain, Strasbourg, Musée national d'art moderne - Centre Pompidou, Paris, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, New Museum, New York, The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, among others.

He has also held solo exhibitions in institutions such as the Centre George Pompidou, Paris, Whitechapel Gallery, London, Art Institute of Chicago, Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, Palais de Tokyo, Secession, Vienna, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, MACRO, Rome, Carre D’Art, Nimes, Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, Contemporary Art Center Cincinnati, Cincinnati,  Bass Museum of Art, Miami, Belvedere, Vienna, Tamayo Museum, Mexico City, Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, Tate Liverpool, Scuola Grande San Giovanni Evangelista di Venezia, Venice, Fundación Casa Wabi, Puerto Escondido, Mexico, and Petit Palais, Paris.

In 2007, Rondinone represented Switzerland at the 52nd Venice Biennale.

Rondinone studied at the Universität für Angewandte Kunst in Vienna before moving to New York in 1997, where he lives and works to this day. 

JOEL SHAPIRO

Joel Shapiro, (Born 1941 in New York, United States) is one of the most widely exhibited American sculpture artists, and is best known for his Minimalist Wood and bronze sculptures.

Shapiro draws inspiration from classical greek sculpture as well as modernist abstraction and sculpture, creating a unique form of figuration. His large-scale sculptures confront the viewer with the dominant material of wood or bronze through abstract, geometric variations; however, his works seem to embody the characteristics of the basic human body in motion, and engages viewers’ physical and psychological relationships with space.

As such, he has spent much of his oeuvre treating the aesthetics of Minimalism through a relatively more playful approach, blurring the distinction between representation and abstraction. Shapiro in this sense has become at the same time a master and subverter of the modern figurative tradition. 

Joel Shapiro moved to India at the age of twenty-two to spend two years with the Peace Corps before returning to study at New York University, completing his BA in 1964, and his MA in 1969.

Since early in his career, Shapiro has had several major exhibitions, such as at the Metropolitan Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art, in New York. His works can be found in the permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, and the Tate Gallery, London, among many other major institutions. 

He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2005 the French ministry of Culture named him a Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters.

MICHAEL CRAIG-MARTIN

Michael Craig-Martin (born 1941 in Dublin, Ireland) is a key figure in British conceptual art and one of the most influential artists of his generation.

Since his time at Yale University in the 1960s—where he studied alongside artists such as Chuck Close, Brice Marden, and Richard Serra—Craig-Martin has been building on a specific vocabulary of imagery based on common, everyday items. He probes the relationship between objects and images, perception and reality, harnessing the unique human capacity to conjure ideas through symbols and signs.

The exhibition at Carling Dalenson Gallery includes Craig-Martin’s monumental sculptures in a medium that he has been exploring since 2011: powder-coated steel forms that describe everyday objects and appear like line drawings in the air. 

The sculptures’ lines are suspended in the air at a grand scale that is both implausible with respect to the objects they signify and unexpected within the serene context of the gallery. The forms have an instant sensory, intellectual, and emotional impact; produced with exacting draftsmanship, they are placed so as to explore spatial relationships through the juxtaposition of color. Their colors—vibrant shades denoted in the works’ titles—have a synthetic, man-made quality like that of Pop art and of the objects themselves. Slyly evocative in their simplicity, Craig-Martin’s sculptures evoke the tangible experiences of everyday life while speaking to the symbolic potency and conceptual power that the represented objects hold. Moreover, these elegant, large sculptures leave it up to viewers to attach their own personal narrative histories to the objects portrayed.

Michael Craig-Martin has exhibited in international institutions such as the Centre Georges-Pompidou, Paris, MoMA, New York, the Kunstverein in Dusseldorf, Stuttgart and Hannover, at Kunsthaus Bregenz and IVAM in Valencia. Craig-Martin represented Britain in the 23rd Sao Paulo Biennial and has had a retrospective of his work presented three times: at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, in 1989, at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, in 2006, and at the Serpentine Gallery, London, in 2015. 

Alongside his personal artistic success, Michael Craig-Martin is arguably one of the most influential teachers in contemporary British art, tutoring artists such as Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and Gary Hume, as a part of the generation known as “Young British Artists”, at Goldsmiths University. Craig-Martin is today a Professor Emeritus at that same institution.