Ugo Rondinone's first solo exhibition in Japan, titled 'Shapes of Silence', will be held at Kiyomizu Temple in Kyoto from 27 October to 12 November 2026, according to Bijutsu Techo. The heart of the show is a group of seventeen stone figure sculptures installed at Jōju-in, a sub-temple of Kiyomizu founded as the residence of the monk Gan'a, whose celebrated 'Moon Garden' gives the temple its fame.

The stacked-stone figures recall the cairns, waymarkers and human-shaped stone structures found across cultures worldwide. For Rondinone, whose father was a stonemason, the material carries a personal weight beyond its art-historical resonance. Set against the garden's rocks, moss, plants, water and borrowed mountain scenery, the figures probe the relationship between the human body and nature, and between geological time and the span of a human life.

Elsewhere, a red-and-black painting of the sun will hang in the temple's alcove. Its concentric fields of colour, radiating from a dark centre, evoke cyclical time: day and night, seasons, life and death. Where the stone figures embody deep geological duration, the sun painting stands for the time that repeats itself each day.

Rondinone, born in Brunnen, Switzerland in 1964 and based in New York since 1997, has long treated nature not as scenery but as a state of mind. Following a major multi-venue retrospective in New York in 2017, the Kiyomizu exhibition continues his recent trajectory of placing work in charged public and historical sites. Born in Brunnen, Switzerland in 1964 and based in New York since 1997, Rondinone has spent decades treating nature as a spiritual condition rather than a view. The temple exhibition, presented with his London gallery Sadie Coles HQ, places that vision in one of Japan's most storied sacred sites, where seventeen stone figures hold their ground among moss, borrowed mountains and the slow passing of the seasons.