Ugo Rondinone’s Long Island home was an accident. He and his late husband, John Giorno, an artist known for his legendary Pop-esque poem paintings, already had a Delaware Water Gap getaway. But one weekend, over 10 years ago, while visiting Rondinone’s late gallerist, Barbara Gladstone, in Mattituck, her real estate agent happened to call to see if she knew anyone looking for a place. On a lark, they took a look. The Swiss-born Rondinone, whose Day-Glo desert hoodoos near Las Vegas, Seven Magic Mountains, instantly entered the land-art pantheon when they were unveiled in 2016, felt an immediate connection to the North Fork space. They “were overwhelmed by the beauty of the property—its old trees, its garden, its water views,” he recalls.
Rondinone wanted to dedicate something beautiful to Giorno after losing him in 2019. With landscape designer Dennis Schrader, he plotted a lush, velvety garden on his five acres out East, a project that Rondinone says “now occupies much of my time whenever I am there.” His years of making environmental art have prepared him well. “The maintenance of a moss garden is endless,” he laments.
“We invented netting, so we could spread the moss by grinding it and mixing it with yogurt.” So far, a private memorial stands in tribute: three of his amorphous cloud sculptures that look like ancient rock formations, one of his famous aluminum-cast tree sculptures, and a 20-foot-high concrete fountain that drips water, drop by drop, from its summit.
Mattituck is a place of refuge and creativity for the artist. Over the last decade, he has developed three distinct bodies of work in the Long Island studio. His sunset paintings capture the North Fork’s magic-hour vista in front of his house, while his sailboat series assembles driftwood and canvas into hand-sewn sails. Most recently, he’s crafted a trio of readymade sculptures, still evolving, from rusted, vintage farm tools—unearthed from a Long Island garage sale—that look just like the ones his grandparents used to tend their small potato farm in Matera, Italy.
Come September, Rondinone will unveil a new exhibition of 15 towering resin “waterfalls” infused with crushed blue gemstones at Gladstone Gallery in New York (alongside a concurrent presentation of glass works at the gallery’s Brussels outpost). The New York show has been two years in the making. “Each began as a small clay line shaped directly from my hands around a thin wire, leaving my fingerprints embedded in the surface,” he explains. But like his sunset, tree, stone, or rainbow motifs, this installation transcends nature as literal subject matter, reflecting personal, psychological states of being. Natural elements are a metaphor for the human condition, he clarifies, “through which we confront longing, solitude, awe, fear, transcendence—geological and mortal time exist within the same material.”
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