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RONDINONE, AND THE SCULPTURE THAT CHOSE ITS END
On Seven Magic Mountains, ten years in the Mojave, and the decision to dismantle rather than relocate.
Seven Magic Mountains,
les sculptures d'Ugo Rondinone dans le désert du Nevada
© Gianfranco Gorgoni Courtesy of Art Production Fund and Nevada Museum of Art
les sculptures d'Ugo Rondinone dans le désert du Nevada
© Gianfranco Gorgoni Courtesy of Art Production Fund and Nevada Museum of Art
Seven Magic Mountains was built to stand for two years. It stood for ten. It comes down in 2026, by the artist's own choice.
There is a place in the Mojave, about twenty miles south of Las Vegas, where Interstate 15 runs past a dry lakebed called Jean and then climbs briefly into low brown hills. If you are driving north from Los Angeles toward Las Vegas and you take the Sloan exit, you can reach, in about seven minutes on a narrow paved road, seven towers of stacked limestone boulders, each tower between thirty and thirty-five feet tall, each boulder painted in a high-saturation fluorescent colour. The work is called Seven Magic Mountains. It was made by the Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone, and it has been there since May of 2016.
It was not supposed to still be there.
The piece was commissioned by the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno, and produced in collaboration with the Art Production Fund. It opened on the 11th of May 2016. The plan, from the beginning, was for a two-year installation. The land on which it stands is administered by the Bureau of Land Management, and the lease specified a 2018 removal date. At the end of the two years, the towers were supposed to come down, and the site was supposed to return to open desert.
Otherworldly Seven Magic Mountains
Milky Way over Jean Dry Lake Jean, Nevada
Milky Way over Jean Dry Lake Jean, Nevada
The towers did not come down. The lease was extended. Then it was extended again. Then again. Somewhere in the middle of all this, it became clear that the work was drawing around three hundred and twenty-five thousand visitors a year, most of them making the short detour off the interstate between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, most of them spending twenty or thirty minutes walking among the painted boulders, most of them leaving with a phone full of photographs. This was not what land art usually did. A piece by Smithson or Heizer demands an afternoon, a day, or, in some cases, an appointment a year in advance. Seven Magic Mountains had become, essentially, without anyone planning it this way, a casual stop. It is now one of the most-photographed works of land art in the world, and probably the only one that most of its visitors see by accident.
By early 2024, the piece had been standing for eight years. The BLM lease, however, could not be extended forever. The land has long been planned for other uses, including a proposed new airport for the Southern Nevada region, and the agency had made clear that the lease would not be renewed past December 2026.
In August 2024, Washoe County in Northern Nevada voted to allocate $500,000 to move Seven Magic Mountains up north. The plan would have relocated the towers onto different BLM land outside Reno, closer to the museum that originally commissioned them. It was a serious offer and the obvious way to prevent the sculpture's destruction. A different desert. A different terrain. The same seven towers, on new ground, with a new lease that could last decades. The county had the money, the museum supported it, and the logistics were feasible.
Rondinone said no.
Seven Magic Mountains, a public art installation
by Ugo Rondinone near Las Vegas
The Nevada Museum of Art made the announcement in July 2025. When the current lease ends on the 31st of December 2026, the work will be dismantled. The boulders will be separated. The paint will be left to the weather. The stones, which were originally quarried locally from near Jean Dry Lake, will be removed from the site, and the desert will be left to do what it has been doing there for a long time. The $500,000 from Washoe County, no longer needed for relocation, has been redirected to a behavioural health facility.
His reason, as stated by the museum, was narrow and consistent with what he had been saying about the work all along. The sculpture was made for the Ivanpah Valley. The particular relation of the towers to the ground they stand on, to the sightline toward the Las Vegas skyline to the north and into open desert in every other direction, to the specific quality of Mojave light, was not incidental. It was what the piece was. Moved to Reno, the work would have been seven painted towers on different ground. In the Ivanpah Valley, it was Seven Magic Mountains. Rondinone held that the option offered him was not to preserve the sculpture but to rebuild something else that looked like the sculpture somewhere else.
This is an unusual position. Most artists, offered the chance to prolong the life of a major work, take it. Sculpture gardens are full of pieces originally commissioned for other sites that ended up at their current locations because the original sites were no longer available. The principle that a work can be stored, moved, loaned, and reinstalled is one of the basic premises of how contemporary sculpture operates as a field. Rondinone rejected the principle publicly for this work, even though the alternative was demolition.
Seven Magic Mountains
What remains is a sculpture whose entire ten-year extension was, in retrospect, a series of confirmations that the end was part of the design. Each lease renewal kept the towers in the only place they would ever exist. When the lease could no longer be renewed, and the choice became relocation or destruction, Rondinone chose destruction because the alternative was the pretence of survival. The piece will not be preserved. It will end where and when it was always going to end, and the photographs several million people have taken will continue to exist, doing whatever photographs of a no-longer-existing work do, which is not the same as preserving the work.
Much of what was written about Seven Magic Mountains during its decade in the desert treated it as an accessible, cheerful, Instagram-friendly piece of public art. This reading was not wrong. It was also incomplete, and the decision to dismantle rather than relocate makes the incompleteness visible. The towers were also, throughout their time in the Ivanpah Valley, a thought experiment about the relationship between a sculpture and its site, quietly being carried out on the shoulder of a major highway. The thought experiment has now concluded. The answer, in Rondinone's telling, is that the place and the work are the same thing, and one cannot be saved without the other.
When the boulders come down in December 2026, the sculpture will not have been destroyed. It will have been completed.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Rondinone, Ugo. Seven Magic Mountains. Commissioned by the Nevada Museum of Art and Art Production Fund. Ivanpah Valley, Nevada, 2016 to 2026.
Nevada Museum of Art, Reno. Seven Magic Mountains project archive.
Art Production Fund, New York. Project records.
Walker, David B. Statements to the press, Nevada Museum of Art, July 2025.
Bureau of Land Management, Southern Nevada District. Lease documentation.
Kastner, Jeffrey, editor. Land and Environmental Art. London, Phaidon, 1998.