Beschreibung:

Rudolf Stingel Untitled 2007 oil on canvas 70 x 100 cm (27 1/2 x 39 3/8 in.) Signed and dated 'Stingel 2007' on the reverse.
Provenance Paula Cooper Gallery, New York Private Collection Gagosian Gallery, Paris Catalogue Essay In Untitled Rudolf Stingel combines visually seductive pattern with sharp commentary on the hierarchy of painting and the museum. For the past twenty years Stingel has been concerned with the nature of painting, and has sought to redefine it through his innovative use of materials and techniques, which challenge the traditional concepts of originality, authorship and fine art. This piece is a quintessential example of his series of wall-paper inspired monochromes. The opulent black-on-black pattern of this work replicates traditional damask, a woven textile originally produced from silk in Syria, and later applied to ornate rococo and baroque wallpaper and carving. Stingel’s upbringing in the Italian Tyrol and Vienna undoubtedly influenced this choice as he was exposed to this lavish style from a young age. By reproducing such a pattern Stingel not only invokes the artistic traditions of the 16th and 17th centuries in Europe, but also highlights issues of authorship and originality as the visual concept and pattern are not Stingel’s own design. The only hints of Stingel’s own intervention in the painting are the slight corruptions in the pattern and distribution of paint. By reproducing wallpaper patterns onto paint and canvas, Stingel is also wryly commenting upon the conventional hierarchy of fine art and craft – by merging the two, Untitled becomes a destabilizing force, disrupting the accepted distinctions between fine art and wall decoration. Andy Warhol similarly fused the two, creating wallpapers which were overtly Kitsch, again challenging notions of fine art. the two are confounded further by the fact that Untitled is a single, autonomous work that hangs on the wall like a traditional painting. The viewer of these works is left unsettled by this flux between wallpaper and painting, fine art and craft. This piece is therefore an ironic statement – painting and wallpaper are shown to be almost synonymous and the fragility of notions of authorship and originality are exposed. This is effectively counterbalanced by Stingel’s sensual application of paint and elegant pattern, invoking the rich artistic history of decadence in Europe. 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