魯道夫·斯丁格爾

Sadie Coles HQ, London

Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2007

Colour: The colour in the catalouge illustration is fairly accurate, although it fails to convey the iridescent nature of the gold paint in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultra-violet light.
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“For nearly twenty years Rudolf Stingel has made work that seduces the eye whilst also upending most notions of what, exactly, constitutes a painting, how it should be made and by whom.”

Roberta Smith, 'Making Their Mark', The New York Times, 13 October 2007, online.

Physically enveloping in its monumental scale, the shimmering gold surface of Untitled is both visually appealing and psychologically overwhelming, drawing the viewer into its luminous interplay between positive and negative space.  The present work is one of the most striking expressions of Rudolf Stingel’s highly coveted series of wallpaper works, first exhibited at the artist’s earliest solo show at Sadie Coles HQ, London. For the exhibition, Stingel created six highly decorative gold paintings, half with an ornate floral baroque motif, the other half replicating the star pattern of an Italian wallpaper from the 1950s, as in Untitled. As noted by Chrissie Iles, curator of Stingel’s acclaimed 2007 retrospective held at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York: “In Rudolf Stingel’s work, the parameters of painting and architecture are turned inside out. The traditional qualities of painting… pictorialism, flatness, illusion, composition, and autonomy… become corrupted by a new symbolic framework in which painting metamorphoses” (Chrissie Iles, ‘Surface Tension,’ in: Exh. Cat., Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (and travelling), Rudolf Stingel, 2007, p. 23).

Melding ornamentation with a strict sense of geometrically guided repetition, Untitled is an attractive testimony to the artist’s profound expansion of the definition of painting. Upon entering the New York art world in 1987, Stingel eschewed the dominant reactionary minimalist and neo-expressionist tendencies, pioneering a process-oriented approach to painting through the creation of his lustrous silver monochromes. In 1989, the artist released his seminal Instructions: a limited edition art book that outlined the complex method by which his iconic enamel works could be replicated. Codifying his technique with a democratic release into the public sphere, Stingel’s critique demystified studio processes and subverted notions of authorial genius in favour of a sense of industrial manufacture and mechanised labour akin to Warhol’s Factory. Created by applying paint through a fine and detailed stencil, Untitled extends Stingel’s pioneering industrialised processes and rigorously critical approach to painting. By outsourcing authorship of his work, in a sense, Stingel achieves what seminal art historian Yve Alain-Bois describes as the internalisation of some of the features and processes of the very technology threatening painting, by mechanising his own body at work, a condition that the post-Impressionist Georges Seurat was the first painter to recognise.

With a deadpan insistence on the materiality and abstract presence of surface, the trajectory of Stingel’s painting, from the silver monochromes to the present work, recalls the conceptually-girded instructional paintings of Yoko Ono, or the wall drawings of Sol LeWitt. The formal beauty of Untitled, further, represents a turning point in the artist’s prolific career, in which Stingel embraced decoration, texture and tactility to create a heightened sensorial environment in the exhibition space, and in so doing destabilised the accepted hierarchy between a work and its context. As the notable curator Francesco Bonami attests, “by disrupting painting’s assumption of material, process, and placement, Stingel not only bursts open the conventions of painting, but creates unique ways of thinking about the medium and its reception” (Francesco Bonami quoted in: ibid., p. 10).