◆ 23 Rudolf Stingel Follow Untitled signed and dated "Stingel 2015" on the reverse oil on canvas 96 x 96 in. (243.8 x 243.8 cm.) Painted in 2015.
Provenance Sadie Coles, London Private Collection, Boston Acquired from the above by the present owner Catalogue Essay “But the Raven, sitting lonely on the placid bust, spoke only That one word, as if his soul in that one word he did outpour. Nothing farther then he uttered—not a feather then he fluttered— Till I scarcely more than muttered 'Other friends have flown before— On the morrow he will leave me, as my Hopes have flown before.' Then the bird said 'Nevermore.' - Edgar Allen Poe, The Raven , 1845 With Untitled , Stingel presents on an epic scale a pair of squabbling ravens kicking off a flurry of snow. Executed in 2015, Untitled is one of a handful of colossal square paintings based on wildlife photographs lifted from a vintage German calendar where each month was accompanied by a different animal from a regional landscape – each painstakingly painted to mimic the original condition of the photographic image. From afar, Untitled appears like a trompe l'oeil ; however, upon closer consideration, the photographic realism dissolves into a painterly abstraction composed from a meticulous system of thick, accrued brushstrokes that endow the surface with a textured physicality. A striking example of the artist’s photo-realistic body of work that he began in 2005, Untitled brilliantly attests to Stingel’s three-decade long pursuit of pushing the physical and conceptual limits of painting to explore the passage of time. Untitled and its related works present a striking continuation of Stingel’s iconic series of paintings from 2009-2010, which were based on vintage black-and-white photographs of the Tyrolean Alps, where Stingel was born and grew up. As The New York Times critic Ken Johnson observed of this series, “Nostalgia adds more complexity. While the imagery suggests personal memories and old scrapbooks, it also evokes a time when Romantic artists viewed wild nature with religious awe” (Ken Johnson “Rudolf Stingel”, The New York Times , March 13, 2014, online). In this series of wildlife paintings from 2015, Stingel similarly plays with the Romantic conception of nature. During the latter 18th and early 19th century, the natural world was divided into the categories of the pastoral, the picturesque, and the sublime – whereby the former two referenced mankind’s ability to control the natural world, and the sublime functioned as a humbling reminder of nature’s overwhelming force. With a knowing nod to this fascination with animals as both forces of nature and metaphors for human behavior, Stingel replaces the sublime vistas of the alpine landscape with colossal vignettes of the species that inhabit it. Whereas other works in the series depict lone animals, such as a fox, a fish, a woodpecker, or an owl, Untitled is distinguished for the dynamism and immediacy embodied in the moment it captures. Magnified and tightly cropped, the vivid scene of two ravens quarreling is exaggerated to a grandiose spectacle of nature. The rich symbolism associated with ravens infuses the work with a dramatic sense of foreboding à la Edgar Allen Poe or Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller The Birds . The gravitas of the scene is belied by its source– a mass reproduced wildlife photograph from a vintage calendar. In his choice of found imagery, Stingel appears to walk in the conceptual footsteps of Gerhard Richter who in the 1960s took found imagery from mass media and family photographs as the source for his blurred photo-paintings. Yet, as Gary Carrion-Murayari has pointed out, Stingel examines painting’s capacity to translate and transform a photographic image in a way that distinguishes him from Richter: “Stingel moves beyond photography by adding a temporal element. It’s not privileging the historic moment, not dealing with photography in the same way that an artist like Gerhard Richter does” (Gary Carrion-Murayari, Rudolf Stingel exh. cat., The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 2008, p. 112). Just as the source photographs for the present ser
◆ 23 Rudolf Stingel Follow Untitled signed and dated "Stingel 2015" on the reverse oil on canvas 96 x 96 in. (243.8 x 243.8 cm.) Painted in 2015.
Provenance Sadie Coles, London Private Collection, Boston Acquired from the above by the present owner Catalogue Essay “But the Raven, sitting lonely on the placid bust, spoke only That one word, as if his soul in that one word he did outpour. Nothing farther then he uttered—not a feather then he fluttered— Till I scarcely more than muttered 'Other friends have flown before— On the morrow he will leave me, as my Hopes have flown before.' Then the bird said 'Nevermore.' - Edgar Allen Poe, The Raven , 1845 With Untitled , Stingel presents on an epic scale a pair of squabbling ravens kicking off a flurry of snow. Executed in 2015, Untitled is one of a handful of colossal square paintings based on wildlife photographs lifted from a vintage German calendar where each month was accompanied by a different animal from a regional landscape – each painstakingly painted to mimic the original condition of the photographic image. From afar, Untitled appears like a trompe l'oeil ; however, upon closer consideration, the photographic realism dissolves into a painterly abstraction composed from a meticulous system of thick, accrued brushstrokes that endow the surface with a textured physicality. A striking example of the artist’s photo-realistic body of work that he began in 2005, Untitled brilliantly attests to Stingel’s three-decade long pursuit of pushing the physical and conceptual limits of painting to explore the passage of time. Untitled and its related works present a striking continuation of Stingel’s iconic series of paintings from 2009-2010, which were based on vintage black-and-white photographs of the Tyrolean Alps, where Stingel was born and grew up. As The New York Times critic Ken Johnson observed of this series, “Nostalgia adds more complexity. While the imagery suggests personal memories and old scrapbooks, it also evokes a time when Romantic artists viewed wild nature with religious awe” (Ken Johnson “Rudolf Stingel”, The New York Times , March 13, 2014, online). In this series of wildlife paintings from 2015, Stingel similarly plays with the Romantic conception of nature. During the latter 18th and early 19th century, the natural world was divided into the categories of the pastoral, the picturesque, and the sublime – whereby the former two referenced mankind’s ability to control the natural world, and the sublime functioned as a humbling reminder of nature’s overwhelming force. With a knowing nod to this fascination with animals as both forces of nature and metaphors for human behavior, Stingel replaces the sublime vistas of the alpine landscape with colossal vignettes of the species that inhabit it. Whereas other works in the series depict lone animals, such as a fox, a fish, a woodpecker, or an owl, Untitled is distinguished for the dynamism and immediacy embodied in the moment it captures. Magnified and tightly cropped, the vivid scene of two ravens quarreling is exaggerated to a grandiose spectacle of nature. The rich symbolism associated with ravens infuses the work with a dramatic sense of foreboding à la Edgar Allen Poe or Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller The Birds . The gravitas of the scene is belied by its source– a mass reproduced wildlife photograph from a vintage calendar. In his choice of found imagery, Stingel appears to walk in the conceptual footsteps of Gerhard Richter who in the 1960s took found imagery from mass media and family photographs as the source for his blurred photo-paintings. Yet, as Gary Carrion-Murayari has pointed out, Stingel examines painting’s capacity to translate and transform a photographic image in a way that distinguishes him from Richter: “Stingel moves beyond photography by adding a temporal element. It’s not privileging the historic moment, not dealing with photography in the same way that an artist like Gerhard Richter does” (Gary Carrion-Murayari, Rudolf Stingel exh. cat., The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 2008, p. 112). Just as the source photographs for the present ser
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.jpg "Quelle: Christie's")
.jpg "Quelle: Christie's")
