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Lot Essay
'In Rudolf Stingel's work, the parameters of painting and architecture are turned inside out. The traditional qualities of painting... pictorialism, flatness, illusion, composition, and autonomy... become corrupted by a new symbolic framework, in which paintings metamorphoses - sometimes literally, sometimes through association... into a fragment of rococo wallpaper or stucko work, a mirrored floor, a thick rectangle of Styrofoam trampled by footprints, an oversized photograph, or a dirty carpet. Stingel's disclosures produce a disturbing sense of artifice...an un-natural state that, in the nineteenth century, was deemed decadent' (C. Iles, 'Surface Tension', Rudolf Stingel, Chicago 2007, p. 14).
Executed in 2007, the year of Stingel's first major retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Untitled marks the artist's ongoing investigations into the possibilities of painting. Created through a unique strategy of semi-automatic methods, Stingel manages to conflate the sublime beauty of romantic painting with the Minimalist commitment to serialisation. His process involves the multiple application of paint through a layer of patterned tulle, imprinting a pre-prescribed stencil onto the canvas. Unlike the rigid repetition of the Minimalist generation however, Stingel's method leaves an indelible trace of human craftsmanship, the paint forming random and uneven deviations that recall Christopher Wool's own visually intense and patterned silkscreens.
It is a remarkable painting that approaches a similar conceptual ground to that of German painter Gerhard Richter. Just as Richter's blurred photo-paintings and Abstraktes Bilds investigate the negotiated line between abstraction and figuration, Stingel's undertake a similar project. As Francesco Bonami has elaborated: 'Stingel creates a transitive way to recede from abstraction into the subject and to push the subject into a different kind of time. While Richter's blur is an anticipation of a forthcoming, more radical disappearance of the subject, Stingel's impressions left by the pattern of the fabric or the soles of the boots are the same as the impression left by the subject on the canvas' (F. Bonami, 'Introduction', Rudolf Stingel , Chicago 2007, p. 14).
Executed in 2007, the year of Stingel's first major retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Untitled marks the artist's ongoing investigations into the possibilities of painting. Created through a unique strategy of semi-automatic methods, Stingel manages to conflate the sublime beauty of romantic painting with the Minimalist commitment to serialisation. His process involves the multiple application of paint through a layer of patterned tulle, imprinting a pre-prescribed stencil onto the canvas. Unlike the rigid repetition of the Minimalist generation however, Stingel's method leaves an indelible trace of human craftsmanship, the paint forming random and uneven deviations that recall Christopher Wool's own visually intense and patterned silkscreens.
It is a remarkable painting that approaches a similar conceptual ground to that of German painter Gerhard Richter. Just as Richter's blurred photo-paintings and Abstraktes Bilds investigate the negotiated line between abstraction and figuration, Stingel's undertake a similar project. As Francesco Bonami has elaborated: 'Stingel creates a transitive way to recede from abstraction into the subject and to push the subject into a different kind of time. While Richter's blur is an anticipation of a forthcoming, more radical disappearance of the subject, Stingel's impressions left by the pattern of the fabric or the soles of the boots are the same as the impression left by the subject on the canvas' (F. Bonami, 'Introduction', Rudolf Stingel , Chicago 2007, p. 14).