Beschreibung:

Rudolf Stingel Untitled 2002 Celotex insulation board, wood and aluminium, in two parts. 240 x 235 cm. (94 1/2 x 92 1/2 in). Signed and dated ‘Stingel 2002’ on the reverse of each panel.
Provenance Paula Cooper Gallery, New York; Galerie Georg Kargl, Vienna Catalogue Essay In the present lot, Untitled, from 2002, the large scale and raw surface of Rudolf Stingel’s composition endows it with an impressive aesthetic. Stingel works with Celotex insulation board, a prefabricated material that ultimately enables him full artistic liberties as his appreciators participate in the ‘active’ art-making process. The art, here, is all in the residue left behind from participation: the graffiti marks and sketches, random acerbic quotes and doodle imagery, all evoke that solitary bathroom stall left to abandonment and desolation: “Stingel imports the sign-language of toilets, underpasses, and bus-stops into the museum, not by quoting and portraying it, but by turning the very act of so-called vandalism into a constitutive element of his art in the museum. Suddenly the path from the formal aesthetic abstraction to real-world social concretion is very short. But it is not illustrative and instrumental (like the model of interactivity commonly encountered in media art: the visitor as laboratory mouse), but interpretative and structural (suggesting independent decisions on usage and interpretation)” (J. Heiser, ‘Medium and Membrane’ in Parkett, Zurich/New York, 2006, no. 77, p. 125). But the present lot transcends the mundane and ultimately propels it forward amongst a larger consideration of Stingel’s impulses and place within contemporary art history: “With their cleanly finished edges, multiple and identical constituency parts, and austerity of material, the works play with the formal devices of Minimalism. But, through their trampled surfaces, they dispel any intimation of participating in that movement’s claims for a quasi-metaphysical purity or transcendence. Indeed, the scale and rectangular shape of the panels… suggest an artistic style antithetical to Minimalism – the contained spontaneity of Pollock’s dripped and poured paintings… So Stingel’s work traffics in the stylistic markers of Minimalism and Abstract Expressionism. But he reduces those markers to features of ordinary experience and leaves the animating theoretical and expressive impulses of both movements behind.” (J. Gilmore, Art in America, October, 2000) In the fashion of popularizing the process of making art and publicizing its methodology, Stingel produced a manual in 1989 with a formula on how to ‘make’ abstract paintings. Then, for the next decade, the artist adhered to his own words, constructing conceptual paintings and site-specific installations based on his own very instructions. Stingel works with ordinary, ubiquitous materials – wallpaper, Styrofoam, insulation, and carpets – as an artist he clearly has roots in the Arte Povera legacy. He seeks to demystify the figure of the artist and the artistic process, by challenging the viewer to reconsider their preconceived notions about what constitutes a legitimate source of art through the very act of its origin and creation. Read More Artist Bio Rudolf Stingel Italian • 1956 New York-based Italian artist Rudolf Stingel was first recognized in the late 1980s for his singular conceptual approach to painting. He constantly questions the function, utility and limits of the medium through hyper-detailed stencil work and by way of a lavish bourgeois aesthetic thrown onto bordered surfaces. Borrowing from the Baroque, Stingel sets up a visual landscape from which the viewer expects excess, but that quickly destabilizes the field of vision by creating a perfectly contained work of traditional beauty. In effort to push the effect of painting to its limits, Stingel notoriously challenges questions of authorship by using various materials, including carpet, styrofoam and silver sheets, to recontextualize surface, depth and color. View More Works