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拍品专文
‘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 … are the same as the impression left by the subject on the canvas’
–Francesco Bonami
With its scintillating silver pattern stretching over three metres in height, Untitled is a monumental example of Rudolf Stingel’s Baroque-inspired works. Executed in 2010, its shimmering painterly surface confronts the viewer like a piece of ornamental architecture or a fragment of decorative carpet. Extending the method initially employed in the artist’s silver paintings of the early 1990s, these works were created by applying layers of paint over a gauze stencil with a spray gun. Raised in the Italian Tyrol and Vienna, Stingel was strongly influenced by Baroque and Rococo aesthetics at a young age. Within an oeuvre that has sought to redefine the nature of flat art, his opulent patterned canvases blur the boundaries between painting, printing and sculpture, operating primarily as material rather than representational entities. His fascination with physical surfaces was brought to a head in his 2013 exhibition at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice, in which he covered the walls and floors of the gallery with Oriental rugs. The present work speaks directly to this aesthetic, inviting us to view it both as a painting hung vertically on a wall, and a piece of horizontal floor or ceiling decoration. As Chrissie Iles writes, ‘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 … 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, exh. cat., Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 2007, p. 14).
Stingel’s method was first documented in his 1989 book Instructions, which provided a tongue-in-cheek guide to producing his paintings. Deliberately demystifying the artistic process, and challenging the aura of the artist’s hand, this deadpan instruction manual laid the groundwork for his subsequent practice. On one hand, Stingel’s approach may be understood in comparison to Gerhard Richter’s squeegee technique, in which the mediating tool – in Stingel’s case, the gauze – serves to guide, rather than to prescribe, the articulation of paint across the canvas. On the other hand, as Francesco Bonami explains, the net results are conceptually different. ‘Stingel creates a transitive way to recede from abstraction into the subject and to push the subject into a different kind of time’, he writes. ‘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 … are the same as the impression left by the subject on the canvas’ (F. Bonami, ‘Introduction’, in Rudolf Stingel, exh. cat., Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 2007, p. 14). Like Christopher Wool’s pattern paintings, similarly inspired by antiquated ornamental languages, these works are simultaneously abstract and literal: as paintings they are non-representational, yet as objects they are highly evocative of the physical world. Caught between these poles, Untitled proposes a new paradigm for flat art: one that is both horizontal and vertical, reverent and subversive, painterly and conceptual.
–Francesco Bonami
With its scintillating silver pattern stretching over three metres in height, Untitled is a monumental example of Rudolf Stingel’s Baroque-inspired works. Executed in 2010, its shimmering painterly surface confronts the viewer like a piece of ornamental architecture or a fragment of decorative carpet. Extending the method initially employed in the artist’s silver paintings of the early 1990s, these works were created by applying layers of paint over a gauze stencil with a spray gun. Raised in the Italian Tyrol and Vienna, Stingel was strongly influenced by Baroque and Rococo aesthetics at a young age. Within an oeuvre that has sought to redefine the nature of flat art, his opulent patterned canvases blur the boundaries between painting, printing and sculpture, operating primarily as material rather than representational entities. His fascination with physical surfaces was brought to a head in his 2013 exhibition at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice, in which he covered the walls and floors of the gallery with Oriental rugs. The present work speaks directly to this aesthetic, inviting us to view it both as a painting hung vertically on a wall, and a piece of horizontal floor or ceiling decoration. As Chrissie Iles writes, ‘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 … 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, exh. cat., Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 2007, p. 14).
Stingel’s method was first documented in his 1989 book Instructions, which provided a tongue-in-cheek guide to producing his paintings. Deliberately demystifying the artistic process, and challenging the aura of the artist’s hand, this deadpan instruction manual laid the groundwork for his subsequent practice. On one hand, Stingel’s approach may be understood in comparison to Gerhard Richter’s squeegee technique, in which the mediating tool – in Stingel’s case, the gauze – serves to guide, rather than to prescribe, the articulation of paint across the canvas. On the other hand, as Francesco Bonami explains, the net results are conceptually different. ‘Stingel creates a transitive way to recede from abstraction into the subject and to push the subject into a different kind of time’, he writes. ‘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 … are the same as the impression left by the subject on the canvas’ (F. Bonami, ‘Introduction’, in Rudolf Stingel, exh. cat., Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 2007, p. 14). Like Christopher Wool’s pattern paintings, similarly inspired by antiquated ornamental languages, these works are simultaneously abstract and literal: as paintings they are non-representational, yet as objects they are highly evocative of the physical world. Caught between these poles, Untitled proposes a new paradigm for flat art: one that is both horizontal and vertical, reverent and subversive, painterly and conceptual.