Rona Pondick in Art in America
Thank you to Albert Godetzky and Art in America for an insightful overview of Rona Pondick’s Monkeys featured in The Belvedere, Vienna, and the range of her 40-plus year practice.
Excerpt from Hybrid Immortality: Rona Pondick’s Fantastical Self-Portraits:
At first encounter, Rona Pondick’s large-scale stainless steel sculpture Monkeys (1998–2001), currently on view in the Belvedere palace and museum in Vienna, may seem incongruous with the decorative opulence of the surroundings. The work comprises eight sleek shining simian bodies chaotically scrambling over one another. In contrast, the Belvedere’s Carlone Hall—named after Carlo Innocenzo Carlone, the Italian artist who contributed the room’s painted walls and ceiling in the 1720s—is a Baroque confection bursting with ornamental forms, colors, and illusionistic architecture, all rendered in fresco. Look slowly, however, and this marriage of distinctive elements from widely disparate periods reveals itself as a clever juxtaposition and a case of curatorial savvy.
Both the sculpture and the paintings play with spatial illusion. Pondick’s mischievous animals appear to spew into the room from some mysterious source, while Carlone’s figures seem to tumble from their celestial dwellings, and the painted architecture defies the room’s structural simplicity. All the components are about metamorphosis and the imaginative possibilities of change.
Hovering in the ceiling above is Aurora, ancient Roman goddess of the dawn and renewal, while scenes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses appear on the walls below. Pondick’s monkeys are themselves transforming into hybrid creatures with human arms and heads. The painted scenery of the Hall, a venue once used for grand receptions, invites visitors to fantasize about the cyclicality and changing nature of human life. Pondick further pursues this strategy: the surfaces of her lustrous, undulating sculptures distort not only the room but its guests, who thus take part in the animal/human metamorphosis. Moving around Monkeys, viewers can follow their own elastic reflections until the images come to a halt on the matte surfaces of the human limbs and heads.
