At Gladstone Gallery in New York, twelve monumental sculptures transform gemstones, resin, and traces of the artist’s own body into an meditation on impermanence.
A waterfall is never still. It falls, changes, disappears, and begins again.
That perpetual movement is at the heart of Ugo Rondinone’s waterfall, a new exhibition at Gladstone Gallery’s 21st Street location in New York. On view from September 17 through October 31, 2026, the exhibition brings together twelve towering vertical sculptures that turn the gallery into an uncanny landscape suspended between geological time, human existence, and transformation.
For Rondinone, the waterfall is less an image to be represented than a condition to be embodied. The sculptures appear to occupy the unstable moment between solidity and disappearance—objects that seem simultaneously mineral, atmospheric, bodily, and artificial.
Sculptures Suspended in the Act of Falling
The twelve sculptures range from approximately 3.5 to 6 meters in height and are arranged in an irregular grid throughout the gallery. Their verticality is essential: rather than depicting flowing water, they suggest waterfalls frozen—or perhaps suspended—in the process of falling.
Each work is made from transparent resin infused with pigments derived from crushed gemstones. The material allows light to become part of the sculpture itself, producing surfaces that can appear luminous and atmospheric.
The works include stones such as lapis lazuli, tanzanite, blue topaz, apatite, blue lace agate, selenite, tourmaline, amethyst, rose quartz, quartz, kyanite, and blue aventurine. Their individual identities are not incidental. Each gemstone carries a geological history measured in millions of years, placing the sculptures within a timescale vastly larger than a human life.
The result is a striking contradiction: the works appear fragile and ephemeral while being materially connected to some of the planet’s oldest processes.
Deep Time Meets the Human Body
Perhaps the exhibition’s most intimate element is hidden inside the sculptures.
Rondinone incorporates ashes from his own hair and fingernails into each work. The gesture introduces a biological trace of the artist into bodies constructed from artificial resin and geological material.
The combination creates three distinct temporal scales within a single object.
There is the technological present represented by the resin. There is geological deep time represented by the gemstones. And there is the brief duration of an individual human life represented by the artist’s bodily remains.
The sculptures therefore become more than formal experiments. They operate as vessels in which different definitions of time coexist.
A gemstone may have taken millions of years to form. A human body exists for only a fraction of that duration. Resin belongs to a comparatively recent technological history. Rondinone brings all three together and asks what happens when those timelines occupy the same physical space.
From Body to Landscape
Rondinone has long explored transformation, mortality, nature, time, and the relationship between the human figure and the landscape. waterfall pushes those concerns into a particularly concentrated material form.
The artist describes the body becoming landscape and landscape becoming light. That transformation is crucial to understanding the exhibition.
The sculptures do not imitate flowing water in a literal sense. Instead, they embody the idea of continuous change. Their vertical forms suggest gravity, while their transparency and gemstone pigments make them seem to dissolve into light.
The waterfall becomes a metaphor for existence itself: always moving, never retaining exactly the same form.
The Gallery as a Landscape
The exhibition extends beyond the twelve freestanding sculptures.
Three earlier works have been incorporated directly into the architecture of the gallery: a hand imprint embedded into one wall, an aluminum zero embedded into another from which incense smoke slowly rises, and a bronze keyhole embedded into a third wall.
These interventions quietly alter the viewer’s perception of the room.
The hand suggests presence and physical contact. The zero evokes absence, emptiness, or infinity. The keyhole introduces the possibility of another space beyond the visible one.
Together, they make the architecture itself part of the work.
Instead of simply installing sculptures inside a neutral white cube, Rondinone creates an environment in which the walls, air, smoke, objects, and bodies of the visitors become part of the exhibition’s conceptual landscape.
The Beauty of Impermanence
There is an inherent tension in waterfall between permanence and disappearance.
Gemstones represent geological endurance. Yet the sculptures themselves evoke motion and instability. The artist’s bodily traces suggest mortality. Resin, meanwhile, is a human-made material associated with the technological present.
The exhibition refuses to resolve those contradictions.
Instead, waterfall proposes that permanence may itself be an illusion. Even the hardest geological materials exist within cycles of transformation. Mountains erode. Rivers alter landscapes. Bodies disappear. Materials are repurposed. Light changes according to where the viewer stands.
The sculptures hold these processes together without attempting to freeze them conceptually.
Ugo Rondinone in New York
Born in 1964 in Brunnen, Switzerland, Rondinone studied at the Universität für Angewandte Kunst in Vienna before moving to New York in 1997, where he continues to live and work. His practice encompasses sculpture, installation, painting, drawing, and other forms of contemporary art.
His work has been presented internationally at major institutions including the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Whitechapel Gallery in London, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Belvedere in Vienna, the Städel Museum in Frankfurt, Storm King Art Center in New York, and the Aspen Art Museum, among others.
His return to the waterfall as a conceptual structure feels particularly resonant in New York, a city where nature is continually negotiated through architecture, infrastructure, and human movement.
A Waterfall Without Water
The most compelling aspect of waterfall may be its refusal to give viewers what the title initially promises.
There is no actual water.
Instead, there are minerals, resin, light, smoke, metal, architecture, and traces of the human body.
Yet the sensation of falling remains.
Rondinone transforms the waterfall from a natural phenomenon into a philosophical condition—a way of thinking about time, gravity, mortality, and transformation.
At Gladstone Gallery, the sculptures seem caught between states: solid and fluid, geological and biological, artificial and natural, permanent and temporary.
They remind us that everything eventually moves.
And perhaps that is the real subject of waterfall: not water itself, but the impossibility of remaining unchanged.
