** 2026 Stock. Edition of 500 ** 1998 brings back into circulation one of Ugo Rondinone’s most intimate and unsettling projects: a diary from his five-part cycle of the 1990s, written and drawn between 1992 and 1998 as the AIDS crisis pushed a newly fearful, homophobic Western society to shove queer lives back into the shadows. Rather than responding with slogans or safe symbolism, Rondinone invented “Ugo,” an artist and drug addict living in Zurich, and followed him across hundreds of pages of text and image. The diaries are fictions, but the pressures they record are brutally real: stigma, desire, self‑sabotage, fleeting tenderness, the constant background hum of illness and loss. In them, the artist stages a kind of negative portrait of the era – a character whose fragility, bad decisions and small defiances refuse the sanitised narratives that were beginning to dominate public discourse around sexuality and disease.

Born in 1964 and based in New York, Rondinone emerged in the 1990s as a major figure in international contemporary art, working across sculpture, painting, installation and sound. His practice ranges widely in material – lead, wood, wax, bronze, stained glass, ink, earth and stone – but consistently returns to questions of nature, spirituality and the human condition, often through pared‑back, symbolic forms. He is perhaps best known for his fluorescent stone totems such as Seven Magic Mountains (2016–2021) in the Nevada desert, vast marker‑beacons where geology and colour collide, as well as for curatorial projects like I ♥ John Giorno (2015), a many‑voiced tribute to his late partner, the American poet John Giorno. 1998 shows another side of that same sensibility: turned inward, small‑scale, deeply implicated in a specific historical trauma, yet still searching for ways to connect individual fragility to larger cycles of time, fear, care and resistance.