Photograph by Francesco Clemente. Image © Francesco Carrozzini / Trunk Archive
Art © 2021 Rudolf Stingel
Rudolf Stingel’s Untitled (Bolego) from 2007 is an enigmatic, sophisticated and technical triumph of painting. Unseen since its acquisition from the artist in the year of execution, the present work is part of a small suite of monochromatic photo-realist self-portraits, many of which reside in the world’s most esteemed private and institutional collections, including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Both an arena for profound self-reflection and an exercise through which Stingel negotiates the relationships between painting and photography, Untitled (Bolego) negotiates both the weighty art historical tradition of portraiture and the more contemporary notions of photorealism. Like Francis Bacon or Gerhard Richter before him, Stingel looks to photographs as source material for his paintings, a decision that confronts the inherent failure of both media to truly capture reality. Presenting from a distance as a faithfully rendered representation of a scene, with crisp edges and sharp delineation of form, the composition dissolves as the viewer approaches, softening and blurring to a carefully modulated abstraction in nuanced monochrome.
Right: Caravaggio, Saint Jerome Writing, c. 1605-06, Galleria Borghese
"There is in this simple cheesy image of a man celebrating himself, probably alone, the weight of art history, the weight of generations of painters asking the same question and never finding the right answer, the responsibility to be in charge of Painting, maybe for the last time, maybe and more tragically, forever.”
Art © 2021 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Intimate in both scale and composition, Untitled (Bolego) sees the artist celebrating his birthday. Martini glass raised to his lips, cigarette dangling casually from his fingers, Stingel’s face is lit by the flickering light of candles placed atop a cake, barely visible in the bottom left corner of the canvas. Despite the festive props, Stingel projects an air of melancholy: his rugged face appears drawn in the ephemeral light of the glowing embers, the furrow of wrinkles on his forehead thrown into sharp reliefas he gazes absently down towards the candles he presumably intends to extinguish in celebration of another passing year. This focused, existential awareness of aging presented through the lens of self-portraiture places Stingel in the company of an extensive and distinguished lineage of artists who engaged in self-portraiture as a means of confronting their own mortality, such as Albrecht Dürer, Vincent van Gogh, Edward Munch, and Andy Warhol. Stingel even adopts some of the traditional symbolic memento mori of Old Master painting, such as the lit candle burning down to its end, and the half-drained glass. Of the birthday cake specifically, Francesco Bonami writes: “The early silver paintings and the recent self-portraits are the two poles of the bipolar nature of the artist and the bipolar nature of painting, torn between the limitless sublime and the suffocating boundaries of the mundane… There is in Stingel’s birthday cake a distinct feeling of a falling empire or the atmosphere of Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, 1959, with even the edge of Harold Pinter’s recent interpretation of the play, the final act. There is in this simple cheesy image of a man celebrating himself, probably alone, the weight of art history, the weight of generations of painters asking the same question and never finding the right answer, the responsibility to be in charge of Painting, maybe for the last time, maybe and more tragically, forever.” (Francesco Bonami in: Exh. Cat., Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art (and traveling), Rudolf Stingel, 2007, p. 20)
Rudolf Stingel’s Esteemed Self Portraits
Rudolf Stingel’s self-portraits from the mid-2000s, which are divided into the Bolego and Sam series, each named after the photographers who captured the images on which the paintings are based, are among Stingel’s best known and most beloved works. Examples from each series are held in prestigious institutional collections, including the Whitney Museum in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, amongst prestigious others. The series also has an illustrious history at auction, with both the record for the artist and the record for a small scale work having been achieved by paintings from this revered corpus.
Within this small corpus of paintings, Stingel complicates our interpretation of the image and destabilizes the authenticity inherent to the tradition of self-portraiture, detaching the image from its original photographic source material. The present work is based upon a photograph taken by the artist’s friend, Roland Bolego, who orchestrated a series of carefully captured photographs of Stingel. Repeated and reworked meticulously in oil paint, the painting places the viewer one step further away from Bolego's original image. In its re-appropriated state, Untitled (Bolego) – named after Stingel’s friend – epitomizes the postmodern discourse of self-consciousness and the philosophical tensions between pictures and pictures of pictures inherent to the very best works of Stingel’s generation: a generation consumed by the authenticity of images and methods of their production.