Get up girl a sun is running the world, 2006
Cast aluminium, white enamel. 457 × 396 × 396 cm (179 7/8 × 155 7/8 × 155 7/8 in). This work is from an edition of 3 plus 1 artist's proofs and is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity.

PROVENANCE Almine Rech Gallery, Paris%
EXHIBITED New York, Ritz Carlton Plaza, Battery Park, Art on the Plaza, 21 January–30 April 2007 (another example exhibited); Venice, Church San Stae, Swiss Pavilion, 52nd Venice Biennale, get up girl a sun is running the world (with Urs Fischer), 2007 (another example exhibited)%

"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." (Ugo Rondinone, from a press release for Creative Time's project, Art on the Plaza: air gets into everything even nothing & get up girl a sun is running the world, New York, 2007) The present lot Get up girl a sun is running the world is a representation of a 2,000-year-old olive tree, like the ones found in the countryside outside Naples, the hometown of Rondinone's parents. Fabricated in aluminum and coated in white enamel this leafless and lifeless sculpture, cast from an ancient olive tree and set within an urban context, confronts the notions of artificialness with naturalness but also reflects upon life versus death. Life, death and the passage of time are evoked by the tree's gnarled trunk and bare branches, beautifully shaped by the forces of nature over the course of two millennia. A living organism with its own cycle of life, frozen in aluminium, painted in stark white, set within an unnatural environment of concrete and glass conveys not only a sensation of death and decay but also of otherworldliness. By this, the artist further investigates the notions of dream, fiction and reality, contemplating mankind's existence and examining the concept of life, always tinged with a poetic melancholia. As early as 1991, he began representing a nostalgic Arcadian ideal, with monumental Indian ink drawings depicting the woods, hills, streams and cottages of a pre-modern world, their simple beauty suggesting man's lost innocence. This existential exercise is taken further in Rondinone's trees which, while appearing to arrest the passage of time, in fact reflect upon our inescapable transience.