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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 stucco 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’, in Rudolf Stingel, Chicago 2007, p. 14).