The rainbow is a bridge between everyone and everything. – Ugo Rondinone
Ugo Rondinone’s latest exhibition at Sadie Coles HQ, the rainbow body, features a series of figurative sculptures within a fluorescent environment. The walls, floors and ceiling of the gallery have been finished in rainbow shades that mirror the sculptures’ own colours, engendering a push-pull dynamic between the individual figure and the landscape of the exhibition. The display also includes bronze sculptures of candles that restate the larger theme of suspended time.
Combining transcendental radiance with a sense of introspection, the rainbow body reprises several of the core concerns of Rondinone’s practice: the interplay of part and whole, for example, or the link between the immediate moment and cosmic time. The polychrome figures – spread across the floor of the main gallery – have their origins in his nude series of 2010, a group of fourteen casts of seated or crouching dancers, each assembled from smaller wax sections (in the original group, clear wax was mixed with earth sourced from each of the seven continents). Naked apart from head coverings, the dancers are captured in moments of repose, their eyes closed. The joins between the body parts are left visible, in a conscious subversion of the casts’ realism.
The nude (rainbow) series marks an evolution of the original sculptures. While the earlier nudes were bound to the earth in their make-up, the prismatic coloration of the rainbow figures betokens a state of transfiguration – the physical body dissolving into light. In this, there is an allusion to the ‘rainbow body’ phenomenon of Buddhism and its antecedents, the highest level of spiritual attainment, whereby the elements of the mortal body transform into the lights of the spectrum before evanescing into pure light.
| Duration | 22 May 2025 - 02 August 2025 |
| Times | Tues - Sat 11am - 6pm |
| Cost | Free |
| Venue | Sadie Coles (Kingly Street) |
| Address | 62 Kingly Street, London, W1B 5QN |
| Contact | 020 7493 8611 / info@sadiecoles.com / www.sadiecoles.com |