Ugo Rondinone: Long Last Happy

Ugo Rondinone was born in 1964 to Italian parents Benito and Eufemia Rondinone in the resort town of Brunnen, Switzerland. His father was born in Matera, Italy, an ancient city built into limestone cliffs and the site of Mel Gibson‘s The Passion of the Christ and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew, both of which cement its status as a venerated religious site. Benito Rondinone was a mason who built stone walls by hand. Benito grew up in Sassi di Matera, a series of Paleolithic-era cave dwellings, which was in 1993 declared a Unesco World Heritage Site but was still a community while Benito was growing up. Conditions were unsanitary and unsafe, and it was ultimately the outcry that followed Carlo Levi’s 1945 account of his time there, “Christ Stopped at Eboli,” that led the government to relocate Sassi di Matera’s residents, including Benito Rondinone’s family, to nearby low-income housing. His father’s upbringing has contributed greatly to Rondinone’s work, influencing his extensive body of work in stone as well as his interest in southern Italy’s olive trees. In a 2013 article for The New York Times, David Colman wrote about the piece of limestone that Rondinone wears around his neck on a leather strap, which had been passed down in his family for many years: “A stone, un sasso, drilled with a hole, it was worn around the neck as a kind of proto-ID. Different stones were worn, 24-7, by different workers in the Sassi, depending on which landowner they were bound to. Benito had never worn it, having left the area while still young, but his father, Frederico, had worn it and given it to his son, just as Frederico’s father had worn it and given it to him, and his father before him.”^[2] Rondinone’s brother Luca, seven years his junior, lives in Brunnen. In Brunnen, Rondinone grew up trilingual, speaking French, Italian, and German.

Rondinone moved to Zurich in 1983 to become the assistant to Hermann Nitsch and studied at the Hochschule für angewandte Kunst in Wien, from 1986 to 1990, where he studied with the artist Bruno Gironcoli. Rondinone also attended Vienna’s Academy of Applied Art, studying under Ernst Caramelle. In 1985 while in school, Rondinone met fellow student Eva Presenhuber, who would become his art dealer in Zurich and his nominal wife.

In 1997, Rondinone was accepted into MoMA PS1’s International Studio Program and moved to New York City, where he continues to live and work. In New York he began a relationship with the artist, writer, and poet John Giorno, after the two met at a poetry reading at St. Mark’s Church in which Giorno was participating. Rondinone and Giorno collaborated on a 1999 exhibition, which developed into a romantic relationship which would last until Giorno’s death in 2019.