The Night of Lead

Mixing menace and unease with buoyancy and optimism, Swiss-born, New York-based artist Ugo Rondinone (born 1963) infuses his sculptures, drawings, videos, photographs, sound art and text works with a wide repertoire of fantasies and fears. Rondinone is famed for his celebratory, rainbow-colored "Hell, Yes!" sign, emblazoned on the New Museum's frontage on the occasion of its 2007 opening. At the other end of his emotional-artistic spectrum lie his outsized monster heads and contorted trees that could be modeled from illustrations to a children's ghost story, and somewhere in between lie such works as his curiously ominous series of heavily augmented doors and his looming lightbulbs. At nearly 400 pages, and with a wealth of color plates, this enormous new monograph from JRPRingier surveys all of these works and more, taking full stock of Rondinone's prolific activity over the past dozen years.