RUDOLF STINGEL | Untitled

Executed in 2012.

Private Collection, Asia
Acquired by the present owner from the above 

“For twenty years now… Stingel has sought to strike a balance between conceptual rigor and the retinal sensuality of painting, between detachment and participation, even between decorativeness and mental purity. His art embodies the paradox of loving painting but wanting to destroy it—or, in any case, to bend it to serve new and unexpected purposes.”

Massiliano Gioni


Exquisitely resplendent and opulent in its stunning gilded surface, Rudolf Stingel’s Untitled from 2012 is at once visually seductive and conceptually complex – an intimately sized yet deeply alluring example of the artist’s iconic electroplated works. Recycling fragments of the graffiti-ed insulation panels that lined the walls of his 2007 exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and the Whitney Museum in New York, Stingel cast the sections in copper and electroplated the surfaces with gold. The reflective sheen of the gilded surface at first resists the gaze, like a mirror, as viewers are involuntarily aware of their presence in the face of the work. And yet upon closer inspection, the proliferation of marks and scribbles fracturing the glistening surface become increasingly prominent to both the eye and mind – their wayward vectors and perforations celebrating and memorializing the passage of time as well as the ghostly enigmatic gestures from a manifold of anonymous sources. Intimately sized, the present work is a rare and refined specimen from one of Stingel’s most celebrated series and encapsulates the very best of his highly conceptual oeuvre that centres on the processes of creation and the cerebral interrogation of the tradition of painting.

Stingel’s creative process behind the present series stems from the artist’s famous participatory installations debuted during his 2007 mid-career retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and the Whitney Museum. The installation comprised expansive aluminum-coated Celotex boards that lined the gallery walls, onto which visitors were invited to imprint, scribble, and incise any kind of mark with any available material in a radical departure from traditional museum protocol. Audience members rose to the occasion with pens, credit cards and even fingernails, adorning the walls with a lively riot of graffiti and etchings that ranged from scratches and perforations to drawings and inscriptions. It was this densely turbulent and richly expressive surface that Stingel harnessed as the mold for the present work: after the exhibitions ended, the artist preserved select sections of the graffiti-ed wall panelling to be cast in copper and electroplated with gold, alchemically transforming the collective vandalizations into something wholly new and valuable – a narrative of a transitory happening made permanent by means of Stingel’s intensive casting process.

As such, Stingel takes on the role of mediator and elevates the scratchings and drawings of anonymous viewers above the status of vandalism into something of value. The gilded veneer of the present work functions as an agent, transforming the banal into the spectacular. Likewise, the use of gold conflates the immaculate opulence of its traditional form with a debased and maimed surface texture, thus inverting the expectations for this valuable medium. Through his wry exploitation of medium and method as witnessed in the present work, Stingel “developed a singular approach to painting that aims to undermine the very essence of the creative act. His works do not always conform to painting’s traditional definition of paint on canvas, yet in their simultaneous attention to surface, image, color and space, they create new paradigms for the meaning of painting” (Robert Fitzpatrick, “Foreword” in exh. cat. Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art (and travelling), Rudolf Stingel, 2007, p. 9).

Rigorously conceptual, the present work reveals a multilayered process of creation that complicates traditional ideas of authorship. As individual marks aggregate in rich layers of expression, each mark loses its unique identity and becomes absorbed into a collective mass. Text that was once legible devolves into pure abstraction, subjected to a lyrical thicket of gesture. In turn, Stingel amasses the marks and reincarnates them anew through the electroform casting and plating process. By this process, singular authorship dissolves into a collectivized whole, which is again repurposed and redefined under Stingel’s single authorship. The mark of the other thus becomes synonymous with Stingel’s own authorial gesture. Through the lens of audience performance and reproduction through casting, Stingel attempts to redefine modes of production in painting. As Chrissie Iles writes: “The performative nature of Stingel’s mark-making makes evident its three-dimensional presence as a symbol of painting, rather than as painting itself. The pristine smoothness of its sumptuous surface has been destroyed, just as the purity of modernist abstract painting was destroyed in the 1960s” (Chrissie Iles, “Surface Tension” in Exh. Cat., Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art (and travelling), Rudolf Stingel, 2007).

As consistent with the overarching themes in Stingel’s art, the present work bespeaks the passage of time, moving beyond mere representation towards an attention to the value of process. Every incision that accumulates on the surface, originally etched by crowds of visitors, is an explicit testament to this reflection on time. Existing as a frozen testimonial of collective memory, Untitled undergoes a process of relentless questioning of the relationship between an object’s mode of production and creator; therefore, the present work is not only evident of transformation within Stingel’s methodology, but also transformation in the viewer’s physical encounter with the art object. In the all-encompassing grandeur of the present work, time is laid bare for us to revisit and reflect upon, as our own presence glistens in the surface.