Rudolf Stingel (born 1956) is an artist based in New York.
Stingel was born in Meran. His work engages the audience in dialogue about their perception of art[1] and uses Conceptual painting and installations to explore the process of creation.[2] Using readily available materials such as styrofoam, carpet, and cast polyurethane, Stingel creates art based upon an underlying conceptual framework and challenges contemporary notions about painting. The surfaces of his two-dimensional works are characteristically carved out, imprinted or indented, visibly evidencing the artist’s alteration of industrial matter.[3] He lives in New York and Bolzano, Italy.[4]
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Stingel became first recognised in the late 1980s for his monochromatic works, silvery paintings with undertones of red, yellow or blue from 1987 to 1994. Stingel’s later abstract paintings from the 1990s consist of oils in pure, brilliant colors exuberantly splayed, dripped, pressed, and pulled across a black field.[5] The works begin with the application of a thick layer of paint in a particular colour to the canvas. Pieces of gauze are then placed over the surface of the canvas and silver paint is added using a spray gun. Finally, the gauze is removed, resulting in a richly textured surface.[6] For his works on paper Stingel is known for a technique of applying oil paint and/or enamel onto canvas or paper through a tulle screen.[7] At the Venice Biennale in 1989, he published an illustrated “do-it-yourself” manual in English, Italian, German, French, Spanish and Japanese, 'Instructions, Istruzioni, Anleitung...', outlining the equipment and procedure that would enable anyone to create one of his paintings.[8] In so doing, he suggests that everyone could produce a work of abstraction by following a simple set of instructions.
In the early 1990s Stingel started his inquiry into the relationship between painting and space by developing a series of installations that covered the walls and floors of exhibition spaces with monochrome or black and white carpets, transforming the architecture into a painting.[9] In 1993, he exhibited a huge plush orange carpet glued to the wall at the Venice Biennale.[10] In his site-specific Plan B (2004), he covered the entire floors of Grand Central Terminal’s Vanderbilt Hall and the Walker Art Center with an industrially-printed pink and blue floral carpet.[11] Simultaneously in Frankfurt am Main, Stingel completely resurfaced one of the rooms of the Museum für Moderne Kunst – walls, columns and floor – with bright red and silver insulation panels printed with a traditional damask wallpaper motif.[12] In other installations, he covered the walls with silver metallic Celotex insulation board and invited visitors to mark them as they wished: at the 2003 Venice Biennale Stingel created a silver room inside the Italian pavilion.[13] As part of his 2007 mid-career retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the artist covered the gallery walls with metallic Celotex insulation board[14] and invited visitors to draw, write and make imprints on the surface of the softly reflective silver panelling, effectively removing artistic privilege from the mark of the individual and handing it over to the collective gestures of thousands of viewers.[15] His paintings from that period are often are created through a performative process in which Stingel covers the entire floor of his studio with Styrofoam and then walks across the thick surface in boots dipped in lacquer thinner. The Styrofoam melts with each of Stingel’s steps leaving behind only the markings of a footprint. The final work is then arranged in single, double or as in this case a monumentous four panels taken from the much larger field of panels that covered the entire studio floor.[16]
Starting with his portrait of gallerist Paula Cooper (Untitled, 2005), Stingel has been embarking on a series of paintings based on photographic portraits, all taken by other photographers (e.g. Robert Mapplethorpe).[17] Stingel’s next engagement with photography arrived as a series of black-and-white self-portraits painted in 2006 [“Untitled (After Sam),” 2005-06], all painted after photographs taken by the artist Sam Samore.[18] They are executed in a gray-scale palette to match black and white photos. He depicted himself in a melancholy state, a mid-life crisis, and once as a much younger man dressed in an army uniform.[19]
Stingel has collaborated with fellow artist Urs Fischer on several occasions.
Stingel has participated in the 1999 and 2003 Venice Biennales. His work was the subject of a mid-career retrospective called Rudolf Stingel and was organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. It was exhibited at the MCA and at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in 2007. In his first solo museum exhibition in the United States, Stingel lined the MCA's three-story atrium space, and a gallery space at the Whitney, with an aluminum-faced installation and suspended an ornate chandelier from the ceiling. The public was invited to scratch messages and images into the soft walls.[20]
2010
Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany
2007
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
Whitney Museum of American Art
2006
Inverleith House, Edinburgh
Day for Night: Whitney Biennial 2006, New York
Where are we going? (Works from the Collection of Francois Pinault), curated by Alison Gingeras, Palazzo Grassi, Venice
2005
EURAC tower, Bolzano, Italy
2004
Love/Hate: from Magritte to Cattelan, Masterpieces from the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
Sadie Coles HQ, London
Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt
2002
Georg Kargl Galerie, Wien
Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
1996
SCAI, The Bathhouse, Tokyo
1995
Art & Public, Geneva
1991
Daniel Newburg Gallery, New York
Galerie Claire Burrus, Paris
Stingel’s prices skyrocketed after his 2007 show at the Whitney Museum in New York, until a big Styrofoam board fetched $1.9 million at Phillips de Pury & Company. Between February 2007 and March 2009, 56 of his works appeared at auction -- more than double the quantity offered over the entire previous decade.[21]