Rudolf Stingel

Galleria Massimo de Carlo, Milan
Private Collection, Germany
Sotheby's, London, 27 June 2013, Lot 311
Galeria Elvira Gonzalez, Madrid
Mignoni & Gonzalez Fine Arts, London
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although it fails to fully convey the shimmering quality and delicately textured nature of the surface visible in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Very close inspection reveals light wear to the corner tips. All other surface irregularities are in keeping with the artist's choice of medium and working process. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultraviolet light.
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“[Stingel's] work demonstrates an acute awareness of the aspirations, failures and challenges to Modernist painting, while at the same time expressing a sincere belief in painting itself, focusing on formal characteristics including color, gesture, composition, and, most importantly, surface.”

Gary Carrion-Murayari, Rudolf Stingel, Ostfildern 2008, p. 111

Simultaneously minimal in composition and magnificently baroque in its shimmering appearance, Rudolf Stingel’s Untitled encapsulates the achievements of the artist’s most iconic body of work. With its subtly textured surface and luscious washes of silver spray paint, the seductive surface of the painting creates a captivating optical effect that is the perfect embodiment of the artist’s formal and conceptual explorations. In fact, as one of Rudolf Stingel’s earliest experiments with process-based abstract painting, the present work from 1988 provides a crucial insight into his impressive oeuvre. Executed only a year before he published his influential Instructions manual, yet already hinting at the Baroque aesthetic of the wallpaper patterns that would only fully emerge in 2004, this work is an intriguing example of Stingel’s highly sought-after early Instruction paintings that simultaneously anticipates the more lyrical aesthetic of his later work.

After moving to New York in 1987, Rudolf Stingel developed a unique approach to painting that involved the layering of thickly applied oil paint, tulle netting and metallic silver paint. Removing the netting after the final layer had been applied, the surface would take on the textured appearance of the tulle, resulting in the characteristic aesthetic of the artist’s early work. This idiosyncratic approach would moreover form the basis of Stingel’s later wallpaper and abstract paintings, in which he created patterns by contrasting this subtle texture with areas of flat paint - as is indeed the case in the present work, where the mesh-pattern is created through incisions into the surface of tulle netting and silver spray paint. The artist’s subsequent decision in 1989 to reveal his signature production process by publishing a step-by-step manual detailing this technique so that anyone could replicate it, has often been understood as a strategy to undermine notions of authorship and originality. At a time when artists such as Christopher Wool and Albert Oehlen reacted to the declared death of painting by undermining traditional conventions around the medium, Stingel’s unorthodox approach was extremely relevant. The artist’s decision to make his technique publicly available, as well as his attempt to involve the spectator in the production of his celotex works, indeed challenged established preconceptions about art-making, shifting the emphasis from the artist to the production process of the work and indeed to the object itself.

However, what sets Rudolf Stingel apart from many of his contemporaries is the impossibility of reducing his practice to merely its theoretical underpinnings. Whilst firmly based on a postmodern approach to painting, Rudolf Stingel’s illustrious oeuvre has always had an unexpected dimension to it. In the same way that the artist’s first figurative portrait from 2005 was inspired by Bruce Nauman and an interest in exhibition-making rather than a turn to photo-realist painting per se, Rudolf Stingel’s abstract paintings are more complex than the execution of a straightforward conceptual procedure. Indeed, the appearance of the Baroque motifs in his later wallpaper paintings, which is interestingly hinted at in the present work, could be read as an oxymoron in the context of the debates around painting in the 1980s: decoration was considered to be the exact opposite of painting in both function and status. Stingel’s decision to turn towards the least likely of sources, not subverting its decorative nature like Christopher Wool in his roller paintings, but exploiting the inherent decadence of Baroque wallpaper patterns, was a completely unexpected turn. As he explained: “Artists have always been accused of being decorators, so I just went to the extreme and painted the wallpaper” (Rudolf Stingel quoted in: Linda Yablonksy, ‘The Carpet that Ate Grand Central’, New York Times, 27 June 2004).

Whilst this indeed undermines the serious claims of abstract painting, it also reveals another, often overlooked aspect of the artist’s practice: the persistence of autobiographical influences. The figurative paintings of medieval saints, the Northern Italian mountain landscapes, the self-portraits and portraits of artists he identified with, as well as the Baroque motifs of the carpets and wallpaper paintings; all point back to autobiographical sources without turning them into subjects - rather, they are used as material to explore the artist’s conceptual and technical interests in painting. In the same way that Bruce Nauman, whom Stingel has cited as a significant influence, turned to the immediate surroundings of his studio without the work necessarily being about the studio, Stingel’s sources are used as a point of departure to explore broader concerns.

As one of the first paintings in which there is a reference to such subject-matter through the introduction of decorative patterns, Untitled form 1988 is extremely significant within the artist’s oeuvre. Whilst the mesh-pattern in the present work is still minimal in comparison to the full-blown Baroque patterns of the wallpaper paintings after 2004, the subtle feature to the right edge reveals that this is more than a formal compositional tool. Likely to be sourced from Northern Italian designs, the painting merges the artist’s early technique with an autobiographically-inspired subject-matter that is perfectly suited to Stingel’s conceptual agenda, which undermines both the artist-driven production process of painting and its serious subject matter at a time when these questions are hotly debated. This somewhat ambiguous position - indebted to postmodern theory yet insisting on a broader outlook on painting as both a practice and process - keeps Rudolf Stingel’s oeuvre continually intriguing beyond its conceptual rigour. This is exactly what makes the present work exceptionally interesting as both an early example of the artist’s theoretical approach to painting and his signature production method, as well as the lyrical aesthetic that characterises much of his later output.