Beschreibung:

4 Rudolf Stingel Untitled 2004 oil and enamel on canvas 99.1 x 99.1 cm (39 x 39 in) Signed and dated 'Stingel 2004' on the reverse.
Provenance Massimo De Carlo, Milan Catalogue Essay “Stingel’s paintings constantly negotiate a truce between kairos and kronos.” FRANCESCO BONAMI “Rudolf Stingel’s work is a new approach, a new attempt to open up this closure and fill the gap between abstraction and figuration. At once performances and gestures, Stingel’s paintings constantly negotiate a truce between kairos and kronos. His abstraction and portraits look into each other, forward and backward, to fill the void left by Richter’s abstraction and figuration. Stingel creates a transitive way to recede from the abstraction into the subject and to push the subject into a different kind of time. ” (F. Bonami, ‘Paintings of Paintings for Paintings, The Kairology and Kronology of Rudolf Stingel’ in Rudolf Stingel Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 2007, p. 14) Captivating in its opulence, Untitled (2004) juxtaposes modernist formal traditions with a focus on light, texture and composition with the innate ornamentation of Baroque and Bavarian Rococo decadence. Following a meticulous creative process, Stingel designs his series of wallpaper paintings by applying gold enamel through a layer of patterned tulle appropriated from original damask wallpaper. Once removed, the tulle leaves behind an arbitrary impression on the canvas, exposing the artist’s hand and preserving his autonomy. Whilst repetitive, geometric patterns refer to the austere seriality of Minimalism, the intricate texture and varying gold tones create a scintillating surface to provide a contemporary dynamic to a classic motif. Focusing on the imprint of the artist’s technique, this work recalls Fontana’s slashed canvases of his Concetto spaziale series of the late 1950s and 60s. Slashing his monochromatic canvases, Fontana attacks the painterly representation and, like Stingel, uses texture and light to create an illusion of depth and explore the concept of positive and negative space. In 2004, Stingel collaborated with Felix Gonzalez-Torres to create a powerful installation which displaced formal painterly traditions with architecture to distort perception and encourage an institutional critique. Adhering to lavish Baroque and Rococo interiors, the present lot similarly redefines painting in the context of architectural design and composition to create a work that resists the restraints of the canvas and challenges the boundaries that dictate the ritualistic relationship between art and space. Read More Artist Bio Rudolf Stingel Italian • 1956 New York-based Italian artist Rudolf Stingel was first recognized in the late 1980s for his singular conceptual approach to painting. He constantly questions the function, utility and limits of the medium through hyper-detailed stencil work and by way of a lavish bourgeois aesthetic thrown onto bordered surfaces. Borrowing from the Baroque, Stingel sets up a visual landscape from which the viewer expects excess, but that quickly destabilizes the field of vision by creating a perfectly contained work of traditional beauty. In effort to push the effect of painting to its limits, Stingel notoriously challenges questions of authorship by using various materials, including carpet, styrofoam and silver sheets, to recontextualize surface, depth and color. View More Works