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Lot Essay
A visually arresting meditation on the nature of painting, Untitled is a radiant example of the aesthetic and intellectual concerns that have preoccupied Rudolf Stingel over the course of his widely-acclaimed career. Painted in 2010, the shimmering metallic coloration, atmospheric blue undertones and subtly textured surface connect this work closely to the Italian-born artist’s celebrated series of paintings featuring traces of tulle fabric in combination with reflecting silver paint. In a ground-breaking move, the artist documented the method employed in making these works in a pamphlet called Instructions. Published in 1989, it provided a step-by-step guide to producing an authentic Rudolf Stingel painting. Propelling his work into the realm of conceptual art by demystifying the artistic process, the deadpan instruction manual anticipated Stingel’s ongoing provocative explorations into the relationship between artist and artwork.
Created in the clear steps outlined nearly thirty years ago by the artist in Instructions, Untitled is a radical meeting of premeditated action and unique expression, which both challenges and parodies conventional ideas of what painting should be. To make the work, gauze material was laid over a canvas generously coated with Prussian Green oil paint, before the entire surface was sprayed with silver enamel. The layer of gauze was then peeled off, as if it were a stencil, to reveal an impression that carries a clear suggestion of the perforated surface of the fabric as well as its folds and creases. In transforming a material that is ordinarily soft, fluid and feather-light into a cold and rigid two-dimensional state, Untitled highlights the artifice of representation. Furthermore, not only does the work bear signs of its mechanical method of creation, but it also displays a unique abstract image that would have been impossible to foresee. This exploration of the relationship between strategy and risk in the creation of an artwork has characterized Stingel’s work since early in his career. As he has said, “I am not the first one questioning the ‘fairy tale of the creativity of the artist’. It derived first and foremost from a feeling of honesty towards myself. The ‘instructions’ were a guide to calculate chance as a working method” (R. Stingel, quoted in “Shit, How Are You Going To Do This One?,” Flash Art, September 2013).
Stingel’s work is complex, threading together multiple art-historical legacies with seemingly divergent concerns. The standardized process the artist uses to create his silver paintings is akin to print-making, and yet the works’ finely nuanced, painterly surfaces resemble abstract artworks that are characterized by highly personal and expressive gestures. The grand scale on which he often chooses to execute these works further reinforces this affinity, as large canvases were also favored by many artists associated with abstract expressionism and the color-field movement. The formal simplicity and restrained color palette of Stingel’s paintings also recall the monochrome paintings of Robert Ryman, Yves Klein and Piero Manzoni, who encourage the viewer to concentrate on the materiality of the work and resist any possible representational meaning. As Reiner Zittl has written, “Stingel may be categorized in the group of artists who passionately pursue painterly effects that for the most part appear almost autonomously on the picture’s surface. The texture of the material’s surface is proof of its manufacture,” (R. Zittl, ‘The Trickster,’ in Rudolf Stingel, exh. cat., Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 2007, p. 32).
And yet, in this present work the folds have fallen in such a way as to suggest imagery that is prescient to a figurative body of work that followed shortly after. In 2010, the same year that Untitled was painted, Stingel exhibited in Rudolf Stingel LIVE at Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. Included in the show were a group of monumental paintings that engaged with the landscape genre for the first time in his career. Using vintage black-and-white photographs of his birthplace, Merano, in the Tyrolean Alps, he made vast, photo-realistic paintings of mountains that copied the physical surface of the photograph as well as the evocative image it captured. The slightly darker lines at the bottom of Untitled, in conjunction with the misty-white color that predominates in this work, could almost describe a snowy mountain peak seen through an enveloping haze of clouds.
While the mountain paintings embrace one of the oldest genres in the history of painting, they are also a continuation of the artist’s ongoing quest to reframe traditional understandings of the medium. On completion, the huge works were left on the floor of his studio and allowed to accumulate dust, dirt and random scuffs and abrasions as a way of marking the passage of time. This was an act of rebellion akin to the 1989 DIY painting manual, for it challenged the notions of artistic production, the aura of an artwork and the authority of the artist. It is in this expert ability to balance seemingly contradictory ideas that Stingel’s strength as an artist lies. Writing about his retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum of Modern Art in 2007, the art critic Roberta Smith observed, “For nearly 20 years [Stingel] has made work that seduces the eye while also upending most notions of what, exactly, constitutes a painting, how it should be made and by whom…. He combines a love of painting with the postmodern suspicion of it, and often achieves a near-perfect balance between the visual and the conceptual” (R. Smith, “DIY Art: Walk on It, Write on It, Stroke It,” New York Times, June 29, 2007).
Created in the clear steps outlined nearly thirty years ago by the artist in Instructions, Untitled is a radical meeting of premeditated action and unique expression, which both challenges and parodies conventional ideas of what painting should be. To make the work, gauze material was laid over a canvas generously coated with Prussian Green oil paint, before the entire surface was sprayed with silver enamel. The layer of gauze was then peeled off, as if it were a stencil, to reveal an impression that carries a clear suggestion of the perforated surface of the fabric as well as its folds and creases. In transforming a material that is ordinarily soft, fluid and feather-light into a cold and rigid two-dimensional state, Untitled highlights the artifice of representation. Furthermore, not only does the work bear signs of its mechanical method of creation, but it also displays a unique abstract image that would have been impossible to foresee. This exploration of the relationship between strategy and risk in the creation of an artwork has characterized Stingel’s work since early in his career. As he has said, “I am not the first one questioning the ‘fairy tale of the creativity of the artist’. It derived first and foremost from a feeling of honesty towards myself. The ‘instructions’ were a guide to calculate chance as a working method” (R. Stingel, quoted in “Shit, How Are You Going To Do This One?,” Flash Art, September 2013).
Stingel’s work is complex, threading together multiple art-historical legacies with seemingly divergent concerns. The standardized process the artist uses to create his silver paintings is akin to print-making, and yet the works’ finely nuanced, painterly surfaces resemble abstract artworks that are characterized by highly personal and expressive gestures. The grand scale on which he often chooses to execute these works further reinforces this affinity, as large canvases were also favored by many artists associated with abstract expressionism and the color-field movement. The formal simplicity and restrained color palette of Stingel’s paintings also recall the monochrome paintings of Robert Ryman, Yves Klein and Piero Manzoni, who encourage the viewer to concentrate on the materiality of the work and resist any possible representational meaning. As Reiner Zittl has written, “Stingel may be categorized in the group of artists who passionately pursue painterly effects that for the most part appear almost autonomously on the picture’s surface. The texture of the material’s surface is proof of its manufacture,” (R. Zittl, ‘The Trickster,’ in Rudolf Stingel, exh. cat., Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 2007, p. 32).
And yet, in this present work the folds have fallen in such a way as to suggest imagery that is prescient to a figurative body of work that followed shortly after. In 2010, the same year that Untitled was painted, Stingel exhibited in Rudolf Stingel LIVE at Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. Included in the show were a group of monumental paintings that engaged with the landscape genre for the first time in his career. Using vintage black-and-white photographs of his birthplace, Merano, in the Tyrolean Alps, he made vast, photo-realistic paintings of mountains that copied the physical surface of the photograph as well as the evocative image it captured. The slightly darker lines at the bottom of Untitled, in conjunction with the misty-white color that predominates in this work, could almost describe a snowy mountain peak seen through an enveloping haze of clouds.
While the mountain paintings embrace one of the oldest genres in the history of painting, they are also a continuation of the artist’s ongoing quest to reframe traditional understandings of the medium. On completion, the huge works were left on the floor of his studio and allowed to accumulate dust, dirt and random scuffs and abrasions as a way of marking the passage of time. This was an act of rebellion akin to the 1989 DIY painting manual, for it challenged the notions of artistic production, the aura of an artwork and the authority of the artist. It is in this expert ability to balance seemingly contradictory ideas that Stingel’s strength as an artist lies. Writing about his retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum of Modern Art in 2007, the art critic Roberta Smith observed, “For nearly 20 years [Stingel] has made work that seduces the eye while also upending most notions of what, exactly, constitutes a painting, how it should be made and by whom…. He combines a love of painting with the postmodern suspicion of it, and often achieves a near-perfect balance between the visual and the conceptual” (R. Smith, “DIY Art: Walk on It, Write on It, Stroke It,” New York Times, June 29, 2007).