Ugo Rondinone's Exclusive Works on View at the Art Institute of Chicago's Bluhm Family Terrace

Five towering stone sculptures set in a suggested fog-shrouded Chinese landscape are now on view on the Art Institute of Chicago's Bluhm Family Terrace. The installation, titled we run through a desert on burning feet, all of us are glowing our faces look twisted., was created exclusively for the Art Institute by Swiss-born, New York-based artist Ugo Rondinone. The installation is on view through April 20, 2014.

Ugo Rondinone (b. 1964) has earned international attention for his poetic, evocative work across a wide range of styles and media. He tends to work in series, selecting a medium and motif that he explores in multiple variations. His best-known groups of works include monochromatic large-scale drawings of trees, multicolored concentric circle paintings, sculptures of recumbent clowns or gnarly olive trees, and rainbow-colored neon signs. These poetic evocations often suggest the passage of time, introspective moods, and charged atmospheres.

The five sculptures in we run through a desert on burning feet, all of us are glowing our faces look twisted. are part of a series that the artist began in 2008 known as Scholar Rocks, a reference to stones found in China's Tai Lake region that were traditionally collected by scholars and used as ornaments for reflection. Scholars' rocks, most standing at less than a foot in height and riddled with holes from natural erosion, have long been admired for their shapes and were evaluated on the aesthetic bases of form, texture, and the ways in which they were molded by nature. Those that suggested representations of figures or landscapes were highly valued; the most asymmetrical and unusual pieces were especially prized.

The works on view are part of a larger series of 17 scholars' rocks that, like many other works in the artist's oeuvre, are poetically titled. Each work in this series shares the same 17-word title-we run through a desert on burning feet, all of us are glowing our faces look twisted., a haiku of now-anonymous origins-but to mark each individual sculpture, a different word in the poem? is capitalized.

The Bluhm Family Terrace is dedicated to site-specific works by leading contemporary artists, commissioned twice annually. Located on the third floor of the museum's Modern Wing, the Bluhm Family Terrace has been the site of installations by Tomoaki Suzuki, Danh Vo, and Katharina Fritsch, among others.

Ugo Rondinone was born in Brunnen, Switzerland, in 1964, and he currently lives and works in New York. He studied at the Hochschule für angewandte Kunst in Vienna from 1986 to 1990. He has had solo exhibitions at the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2003); Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia (2003); Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (2004); Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (2006); Creative Time: Art on the Plaza, Battery Park, New York (2007); and Hell, Yes!, New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (2007). Rondinone has been included in notable group exhibitions such as the Berlin Biennale (1998); Liverpool Biennale, Great Britain (2002); 7th Lyon Biennale, France (2003); 54th Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (2004); and Super Vision at the ICA, Boston (2006). Rondinone represented Switzerland, along with Urs Fischer, in the 52nd Venice Biennale (2007).

we run through a desert on burning feet, all of us are glowing our faces look twisted. is organized by the Art Institute of Chicago with major funding from the Bluhm Family Endowment Fund, which supports exhibitions of modern and contemporary sculpture. The exhibition is curated by James Rondeau, Frances and Thomas Dittmer Chair and Curator, Department of Contemporary Art at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Image: Ugo Rondinone. we run through a desert on burning feet, all of us are glowing our faces look twisted., 2008. Photograph courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels.