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Lot Essay
Blurring the lines between abstraction and figuration, Rudolf Stingel reinvigorates the practice of painting in Untitled. A visual exploration of a style that emulates the grandeur of the Baroque period, the present painting reflects the artist’s signature process-based technique. Stingel’s works masterfully convey a conceptual approach to the genre.
With Untitled, Stingel commits to the dark color palette that he utilized throughout many of his paintings. The ornamental stencil design manifests in the ashen swirls of color that emerge from the black void of the canvas’s surface. The repetition of the pattern invites the viewer to consider the dichotomy between the mechanical process behind the work and the evidence of the artist’s hand. A painterly homage to the opulent wallpaper of the Baroque period, Stingel negotiates the tension of the painting’s surface in the application of paint that provides depth while also adhering to a two dimensional plane.
Stingel’s process-based approach to painting disrupts the painterly tradition by emphasizing a streamlined method that is reminiscent of the mechanization behind Andy Warhol’s silkscreens. He begins his works by applying multiple coats of paint through a layer of patterned tulle, imprinting a stencil upon the canvas. His paintings separate him from his peers as he attempts to visually manifest the multi-faceted relationship between Modernism and Minimalism, depth and absence, and the figurative and abstractive forms. In doing so, he encourages the viewer to contemplate the history of painting and reinterpret its function in relation to its architectural surroundings.
Curator and critic Francesco Bonami remarks on Stingel’s unique approach as follows: “To comprehend why Stingel’s practice is not painting as a medium, or painting for the sake of painting, or even the self-mocking of painting, but the celebration of painting as the derma, or skin, of reality, a very thin surface where we can leave our marks, which are not necessarily always art. Stingel’s art is not Stingel’s painting. Stingel’s art is the understanding of painting as the impossibility of creating of creating a ‘Painting’, and not only and endlessly creating, like Sisyphus, an infinite series of paintings as a self-portrait of painting...” (F. Bonami, Rudolf Stingel, New Haven and London, 2007, p. 17).
Stingel’s paintings emerged as outliers among his fellow artists from the 1980s. His restrained aesthetic refuses the emotional complexity and gestural form of Neo-Expressionist paintings and instead highlights the mechanical process behind his works. At the 1989 Venice Biennale he released an instruction manual that informed the reader on how to replicate a Stingel work of their own.
By refusing to attach emotional significance to his works and inviting the viewer to participate, Stingel clearly expresses his interest in redefining the parameters of painting. He reorients the significance of the subject and its context within an art historical framework, as Chrisse Iles writes: “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’, Rudolf Stingel, Chicago 2007, p. 14).
This painting challenges the viewer to reconsider the art historical tradition that divides art and craft and in doing so, expands the definition of painting that historically disqualifies decorative arts from consideration as fine art. Explaining his choice of subject matter, Stingel wryly remarked, “…artists have always been accused of being decorators, so I just went to the extreme and painted the wallpaper”(R. Stingel quoted by L. Yablonsky, “The Carpet that Ate Grand Central” in The New York Times, 27 June 2004). Stingel’s translation of Baroque wallpaper into a work of fine art signifies his dedication to a conceptual approach to painting that honors the like-minded sentiments of his intellectual predecessor Gerhard Richter.
Emerging from a generation of artists in the 1980s who became active as painting was famously declared dead, Rudolf Stingel’s oeuvre encompasses a variety of unconventional painterly mediums in his attempt to explore this art form. Here, Stingel specifically engages with the painting’s role in influencing viewers’ perception, the environment in which it is typically displayed, and the rhetoric surrounding its creation and reception. This painting in particular serves as a beacon of his ability to flirt between the abstract and figurative styles in a manner that establishes him as a renegade of conceptual art.
With Untitled, Stingel commits to the dark color palette that he utilized throughout many of his paintings. The ornamental stencil design manifests in the ashen swirls of color that emerge from the black void of the canvas’s surface. The repetition of the pattern invites the viewer to consider the dichotomy between the mechanical process behind the work and the evidence of the artist’s hand. A painterly homage to the opulent wallpaper of the Baroque period, Stingel negotiates the tension of the painting’s surface in the application of paint that provides depth while also adhering to a two dimensional plane.
Stingel’s process-based approach to painting disrupts the painterly tradition by emphasizing a streamlined method that is reminiscent of the mechanization behind Andy Warhol’s silkscreens. He begins his works by applying multiple coats of paint through a layer of patterned tulle, imprinting a stencil upon the canvas. His paintings separate him from his peers as he attempts to visually manifest the multi-faceted relationship between Modernism and Minimalism, depth and absence, and the figurative and abstractive forms. In doing so, he encourages the viewer to contemplate the history of painting and reinterpret its function in relation to its architectural surroundings.
Curator and critic Francesco Bonami remarks on Stingel’s unique approach as follows: “To comprehend why Stingel’s practice is not painting as a medium, or painting for the sake of painting, or even the self-mocking of painting, but the celebration of painting as the derma, or skin, of reality, a very thin surface where we can leave our marks, which are not necessarily always art. Stingel’s art is not Stingel’s painting. Stingel’s art is the understanding of painting as the impossibility of creating of creating a ‘Painting’, and not only and endlessly creating, like Sisyphus, an infinite series of paintings as a self-portrait of painting...” (F. Bonami, Rudolf Stingel, New Haven and London, 2007, p. 17).
Stingel’s paintings emerged as outliers among his fellow artists from the 1980s. His restrained aesthetic refuses the emotional complexity and gestural form of Neo-Expressionist paintings and instead highlights the mechanical process behind his works. At the 1989 Venice Biennale he released an instruction manual that informed the reader on how to replicate a Stingel work of their own.
By refusing to attach emotional significance to his works and inviting the viewer to participate, Stingel clearly expresses his interest in redefining the parameters of painting. He reorients the significance of the subject and its context within an art historical framework, as Chrisse Iles writes: “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’, Rudolf Stingel, Chicago 2007, p. 14).
This painting challenges the viewer to reconsider the art historical tradition that divides art and craft and in doing so, expands the definition of painting that historically disqualifies decorative arts from consideration as fine art. Explaining his choice of subject matter, Stingel wryly remarked, “…artists have always been accused of being decorators, so I just went to the extreme and painted the wallpaper”(R. Stingel quoted by L. Yablonsky, “The Carpet that Ate Grand Central” in The New York Times, 27 June 2004). Stingel’s translation of Baroque wallpaper into a work of fine art signifies his dedication to a conceptual approach to painting that honors the like-minded sentiments of his intellectual predecessor Gerhard Richter.
Emerging from a generation of artists in the 1980s who became active as painting was famously declared dead, Rudolf Stingel’s oeuvre encompasses a variety of unconventional painterly mediums in his attempt to explore this art form. Here, Stingel specifically engages with the painting’s role in influencing viewers’ perception, the environment in which it is typically displayed, and the rhetoric surrounding its creation and reception. This painting in particular serves as a beacon of his ability to flirt between the abstract and figurative styles in a manner that establishes him as a renegade of conceptual art.