Ugo Rondinone’s the rainbow body at Aspen Art Museum: A Prismatic Exploration of Transformation
Between December 12, 2024, and March 30, 2025, Aspen Art Museum presents the rainbow body, the first major institutional exhibition in Colorado for Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone (b. 1964, Brunnen, Switzerland). With a career spanning over three decades, Rondinone is celebrated for immersive, multi-disciplinary installations that incorporate photography, painting, poetry, outdoor sculpture, and neon signage. His latest exhibition transforms the Museum’s second-floor gallery into a luminous arena, where lifelike, fluorescent wax sculptures of dancers rest in poised anticipation.
Renowned for his distinctive visual language—where nature, mythology, and human experience intersect—Rondinone consistently employs recurring motifs of clouds, trees, stones, and celestial bodies. With the rainbow body, he explores the significance of the rainbow as both a natural phenomenon and a potent symbol imbued with mystical and political undertones. “The rainbow is a bridge between everyone and everything,” he explains. “Nature is not something apart from us, but intrinsic.”
The exhibition title references a profound spiritual rite in Tibetan Buddhism, wherein the body, upon death, dissolves into radiant light—a process marking the highest form of enlightenment. This transcendence becomes the foundation of Rondinone’s vision, where human forms hover between materiality and transformation.
At the heart of the rainbow body are thirteen hyperrealistic wax figures of dancers, each rendered in vivid hues. Cast with meticulous detail, these figures avert their gazes, engaged in an internal stillness that defies interaction yet pulses with vitality. Accompanying them, a series of cast bronze candles, aptly titled still lives, rest upon the gallery’s vibrant yellow floor—meditative relics of impermanence, frozen in time. Nearby, a stained-glass clock channels light through an adjacent nave, yet its hands are absent, suspending the passage of time in an enigmatic liminality.
These distinct yet interwoven bodies of work—each conceived over a decade ago—converge at Aspen Art Museum for the first time. Rondinone’s previous wax figures, originally cast in subdued earthy tones, now emerge in electrifying prismatic shades, signaling a shift toward transcendence. The interplay between ephemeral wax, enduring bronze, and ethereal stained glass forms a conceptual trilogy, charting a journey from the corporeal to the sublime.
Through this symphonic convergence of material, color, and form, the rainbow body unveils the intricate dialogue between permanence and dissolution, nature and spirituality, past and future. By forging links between the natural world and the metaphysical, Rondinone continues his lifelong investigation into the dematerialization of the human body and encounters with the sublime—an exploration that feels ever more resonant in our contemporary moment.
the rainbow body will be on view at Aspen Art Museum until March 30, 2025.
