Moonrise. West. June, is part of a series devoted to the solar calendar. The work intentionally look like a child’s attempt to model clay, revealing beneath its polished aluminium surface traces of a spatula and prints left by the fingers that once worked the material. The piece expresses the influence of the stars on the psyche. 

The Moonrise masks are forerunners of the series of giants created by Ugo Rondinone in 2006, twelve sculptures each of which bears the name of a month of the year. An allusion to the passage of time and its eternal repetition, the masks form a cycle of figures with a wonderful range of expressions, from sadness to joy through a series of mysterious smiles. They are part of the history of art, following in the wake of ancient Greek, African and Japanese masks, and, like them, they embody the link between humans and the nonhuman, be it nature, the gods, or death.