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Lot Essay
Rudolf Stingel is known for exploring the space and specificity of the medium of painting, often employing materials that are rarely associated with its practice. Part of a generation of artists who became active as painting was famously declared dead in the 1980s, Stingel specifically engages with its role in shaping viewers' perception, the environment in which it is typically presented, and the rhetoric surrounding its creation and reception.
Although using simple, minimal gestures, Stingel's works nonetheless depart from a minimalist aesthetic by self-consciously embracing ornamental patterns and opulent materials such as gold paint and ornate chandeliers for illumination. Many of his works emphasize physicality and surface, with some inviting audience interaction through touch and inscription.
For his first solo show in New York in 1991, Stingel covered an otherwise empty gallery space with a thick orange carpet, which imbued a rosy reflection on the white walls. This idea was revisited in 2004 with Plan B, when the artist installed a floor-to-floor white-and-purple, flower-patterned rug in the Vanderbilt Hall of New York's Grand Central Terminal, thus merging the spheres of decorative art and kitsch to create an altered perception of space. For his 2007 mid-career retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, he decorated a room with silver foil and called on visitors to use whatever materials at their disposals to add to the work. In other works, Stingel has carved out geometric patterns from Styrofoam and, more recently, created photorealist portraits (including self-portraits) in a seemingly ironic comment on dexterity and the artist's touch. An earlier project, by contrast, involved providing detailed instructions for how to make his abstract works from scratch.
In Untitled, Stingel presents an even pattern of thin white lines across a smooth, silver-colored surface. Part of a small body of work referred to as the artist's "chain-link" paintings, the pattern resembles chicken wire mesh, thus adding a figurative component to the otherwise abstract composition. Produced by applying paint over a piece of tulle, a small, delicate pattern is visible within the white paint, which appears thicker in some areas and thus suggests depth while also providing a self-reflective reminder about its procedure.
In contrast to a series of similarly-sized paintings depicting ornate Baroque-style decorations, the at once elaborate and austere pattern in the present work appears spatially ambiguous. Evoking industrial means of production, it has an eerie, hypnotic effect, while the consistent repetition itself insinuates infinity. As if a tongue-in-cheek comment on creative expression, the tapestry-like surface suggests an orchestration of space similar to many of Stingel's three-dimensional works. In both cases, there is an uneasy equilibrium between the aesthetic experience of the work and its physical relationship to its environment. As the art critic Roberta Smith has noted, Stingel "combines a love of painting with the postmodern suspicion of it, and often achieves a near-perfect balance between the visual and the conceptual."1
1 Roberta Smith, "DIY Art: Walk on It, Write on It, Stroke It," The New York Times (June 29, 2007).
Although using simple, minimal gestures, Stingel's works nonetheless depart from a minimalist aesthetic by self-consciously embracing ornamental patterns and opulent materials such as gold paint and ornate chandeliers for illumination. Many of his works emphasize physicality and surface, with some inviting audience interaction through touch and inscription.
For his first solo show in New York in 1991, Stingel covered an otherwise empty gallery space with a thick orange carpet, which imbued a rosy reflection on the white walls. This idea was revisited in 2004 with Plan B, when the artist installed a floor-to-floor white-and-purple, flower-patterned rug in the Vanderbilt Hall of New York's Grand Central Terminal, thus merging the spheres of decorative art and kitsch to create an altered perception of space. For his 2007 mid-career retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, he decorated a room with silver foil and called on visitors to use whatever materials at their disposals to add to the work. In other works, Stingel has carved out geometric patterns from Styrofoam and, more recently, created photorealist portraits (including self-portraits) in a seemingly ironic comment on dexterity and the artist's touch. An earlier project, by contrast, involved providing detailed instructions for how to make his abstract works from scratch.
In Untitled, Stingel presents an even pattern of thin white lines across a smooth, silver-colored surface. Part of a small body of work referred to as the artist's "chain-link" paintings, the pattern resembles chicken wire mesh, thus adding a figurative component to the otherwise abstract composition. Produced by applying paint over a piece of tulle, a small, delicate pattern is visible within the white paint, which appears thicker in some areas and thus suggests depth while also providing a self-reflective reminder about its procedure.
In contrast to a series of similarly-sized paintings depicting ornate Baroque-style decorations, the at once elaborate and austere pattern in the present work appears spatially ambiguous. Evoking industrial means of production, it has an eerie, hypnotic effect, while the consistent repetition itself insinuates infinity. As if a tongue-in-cheek comment on creative expression, the tapestry-like surface suggests an orchestration of space similar to many of Stingel's three-dimensional works. In both cases, there is an uneasy equilibrium between the aesthetic experience of the work and its physical relationship to its environment. As the art critic Roberta Smith has noted, Stingel "combines a love of painting with the postmodern suspicion of it, and often achieves a near-perfect balance between the visual and the conceptual."