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Lot Essay
Glistening in silver and a lavish burgundy, Rudolf Stingel’s Untitled (2012) continues his celebrated series of carpet paintings, offering a vast, painted recreation of a Middle Eastern rug that takes on a monolithic quality as it hangs before the viewer. Painted according to the artist’s carefully developed process, the work is a product of layering and spray-painting: Stingel places sheets of patterned gauze over the painted canvas then sprays his silver paint over this makeshift stencil, before finally removing the material at the end of the sequence. These multiple layers of iridescent paint seem to glow through each other to produce a shimmering, lustrous vision: a renovation of his source material that retains its elegance and exquisite detail while at the same time posing profound conceptual questions – about the relationship between art objects and decoration, the aesthetic connections linking East and West, and the process of painting itself.
Emerging in the late 1980s with his series of silver paintings of tulle fabrics – ancestors of later carpet paintings like this one – Stingel’s understated aesthetic and almost mechanical methodology stood out from the grandiose, self-interested Neo-Expressionism that had dominated the world of painting throughout the decade. Rather than engaging in the emotional confessionalism and gestural painting of his contemporaries, Stingel’s work seemed to be strongly informed by both developments in Conceptualism as well as by a Warholian sense of painting as a process of image manufacture: at the 1989 Venice Biennale, he released Istruzioni, an illustrated manual of instructions, explaining to interested readers how they might go about producing their own do-it-yourself Stingels, and exploding the myth of the painting as a conduit of feeling and artistic genius.
Carpet has also played a vital part of in this aspect of artist’s practice – not only in his painting, but also in installation form; Stingel has produced several immersive site-specific pieces using carpet as his primary material, with his celebrated 2013 installation at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice, in which he covered the entire interior of the building in a Persian rug design, its apex. This use of ornament and decoration as to structure his artwork – he has used European Baroque brocade motifs as well as Middle Eastern designs – blurs the notion of art as a purely aesthetic experience with the functionality of the decorative arts. In using immediately recognisable visual languages of decorative style like these, Stingel’s work seems to reduce his art to ornament, pointing up as it does so the way in which all art might be considered a species of decoration. At the same time, with the artist’s process reducing the act of painting to a kind of formulaic construction, attention is drawn instead to the craftsmanship underlying the original design, a kind of craftsmanship not usually thought to be imbued with aesthetic genius but that here becomes the centre of the artwork. Moreover, the use of this rug design also emphasises the manner in which this division between art and craft has helped structure European notions of West and East – a Western art historical tradition that conceptualises itself as the story of great men of individual genius in comparison with the anonymous homogeneity of Eastern craftsmanship. Stingel’s work seems to forge a path between these two ideas, questioning their legitimacy, while never completely invalidating it, continuing to produce art that delicately oscillates between surface and depth, opulence and beauty.
Emerging in the late 1980s with his series of silver paintings of tulle fabrics – ancestors of later carpet paintings like this one – Stingel’s understated aesthetic and almost mechanical methodology stood out from the grandiose, self-interested Neo-Expressionism that had dominated the world of painting throughout the decade. Rather than engaging in the emotional confessionalism and gestural painting of his contemporaries, Stingel’s work seemed to be strongly informed by both developments in Conceptualism as well as by a Warholian sense of painting as a process of image manufacture: at the 1989 Venice Biennale, he released Istruzioni, an illustrated manual of instructions, explaining to interested readers how they might go about producing their own do-it-yourself Stingels, and exploding the myth of the painting as a conduit of feeling and artistic genius.
Carpet has also played a vital part of in this aspect of artist’s practice – not only in his painting, but also in installation form; Stingel has produced several immersive site-specific pieces using carpet as his primary material, with his celebrated 2013 installation at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice, in which he covered the entire interior of the building in a Persian rug design, its apex. This use of ornament and decoration as to structure his artwork – he has used European Baroque brocade motifs as well as Middle Eastern designs – blurs the notion of art as a purely aesthetic experience with the functionality of the decorative arts. In using immediately recognisable visual languages of decorative style like these, Stingel’s work seems to reduce his art to ornament, pointing up as it does so the way in which all art might be considered a species of decoration. At the same time, with the artist’s process reducing the act of painting to a kind of formulaic construction, attention is drawn instead to the craftsmanship underlying the original design, a kind of craftsmanship not usually thought to be imbued with aesthetic genius but that here becomes the centre of the artwork. Moreover, the use of this rug design also emphasises the manner in which this division between art and craft has helped structure European notions of West and East – a Western art historical tradition that conceptualises itself as the story of great men of individual genius in comparison with the anonymous homogeneity of Eastern craftsmanship. Stingel’s work seems to forge a path between these two ideas, questioning their legitimacy, while never completely invalidating it, continuing to produce art that delicately oscillates between surface and depth, opulence and beauty.