Ugo Rondinone,
air gets into everything even nothing &
get up girl a sun is running the world
February 1 - August 31, 2007

Creative Time presents air gets into everything even nothing & get up girl a sun is running the world. Fabricated in aluminum and coated in white enamel, the sculptures are cast from trees found in the countryside outside Naples, the hometown of the artist’s parents. In accordance with Italian law, the trees, which still bear olives, were cast on site in rubber; in the foundry, wax gave way to a final aluminum cast. Introducing metallic casts of this ancient tree to Lower Manhattan’s modern metropolis, typically defined by manmade structures of glass and concrete, the artist furthers his investigation of themes of time and displacement, and the relationship between natural and artificial environments. The white trees, weighing a ton each, will complement New York City’s winter landscape, establishing a discourse between the history-laden olive trees and their unusual urban context.

In Rondinone’s words, “What interests me about the two 2000-year-old olive trees is the fact that once they are cast bare naked they become a memoriam of condensed time. Through a cast olive tree you can not only experience the lapse of real time, that is lived time, frozen in its given form, but through this transformation also a different calibrated temporality. Time can be experienced as a lived abstraction, where the shape is formed by this accumulation of time and wind force. If my work in general has a nonlinear approach to the world, then the system and concept of time, which has occupied my work since the beginning, gives me a certain sense of grounding.”  Known for a poetic vision that often extends to the titles of his works, the artist has named the cast trees with his own short poems: air gets into everything even nothing and get up girl a sun is running the world.