PROPERTY FROM THE VALENCIA CONTEMPORARY ART COLLECTION Rudolf Stingel Untitled 2002 Celotex insulation and aluminium foil on board in four parts. Each: 121 x 236 cm (47 1/2 x 93 in) Overall: 242 x 472 cm (95 x 186 in). Signed and dated 'Stingel 2002' on the reverse of each panel.
Provenance Paula Cooper Gallery, New York; Georg Kargl Fine Art, Vienna Catalogue Essay Over the last three decades, Rudolf Stingel has built an impressive oeuvre demystifying the idea of the work of art and the creation process. Stingel challenges the viewer to reconsider their preconceived notions about what constitutes a legitimate source of art through the very act of its origin and creation. He challenges the idea of the hand of the artist by including others in the creation process in some of his works. Clearly influenced by Arte Povera, Stingel turns on its head the traditional structure of painting by using ordinary ubiquitous materials to create objects of fine art. The present lot is the result of a performative installation in which members of the public were allowed to deface the surface of temporary Celotex walls installed in public spaces. The resulting destruction and accumulation was then fragmented into many segments and then reassembled as a finished work of art to be exhibited in a gallery or museum. The additive and subtractive marks found across Stingel’s reflective surfaces become poignant tableaux of contemporary life elevating the mundane and the everyday to high art. The large scale and raw surface of Rudolf Stingel’s Untitled lends the work an immediatlt striking aesthetic. Stingel works with Celotex insulation board, a prefabricated material that ultimately enables him full artistic liberties as his appreciators participate in the ‘active’ art-making process. The art, here, is all in the residue left behind from participation: the graffiti marks and sketches, random acerbic quotes and doodle imagery, all evoke that solitary bathroom stall left to abandonment and desolation: “Stingel imports the sign-language of toilets, underpasses, and bus-stops into the museum, not by quoting and portraying it, but by turning the very act of so-called vandalism into a constitutive element of his art in the museum. Suddenly the path from the formal aesthetic abstraction to real-world social concretion is very short. But it is not illustrative and instrumental (like the model of interactivity commonly encountered in media art: the visitor as laboratory mouse), but interpretative and structural (suggesting independent decisions on usage and interpretation)” (J. Heiser, ‘Medium and Membrane’ in Parkett, Zurich/New York, 2006, no. 77, p. 125). But the present lot transcends the mundane and ultimately propels it forward amongst a larger consideration of Stingel’s impulses and place within contemporary art history: “With their cleanly finished edges, multiple and identical constituency parts, and austerity of material, the works play with the formal devices of Minimalism. But, through their trampled surfaces, they dispel any intimation of participating in that movement’s claims for a quasi-metaphysical purity or transcendence. Indeed, the scale and rectangular shape of the panels… suggest an artistic style antithetical to Minimalism – the contained spontaneity of Pollock’s dripped and poured paintings… So Stingel’s work traffics in the stylistic markers of Minimalism and Abstract Expressionism. But he reduces those markers to features of ordinary experience and leaves the animating theoretical and expressive impulses of both movements behind.” (J. Gilmore, Art in America, October, 2000) Stingel's paintings created by viewers inscribing graffi ti-like marks in walls clad in aluminum insulation panels succeed because the viewer associates the work with a mental image of gestural abstract surfaces employed by artists such as Jackson Pollock or Cy Twombly 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
PROPERTY FROM THE VALENCIA CONTEMPORARY ART COLLECTION Rudolf Stingel Untitled 2002 Celotex insulation and aluminium foil on board in four parts. Each: 121 x 236 cm (47 1/2 x 93 in) Overall: 242 x 472 cm (95 x 186 in). Signed and dated 'Stingel 2002' on the reverse of each panel.
Provenance Paula Cooper Gallery, New York; Georg Kargl Fine Art, Vienna Catalogue Essay Over the last three decades, Rudolf Stingel has built an impressive oeuvre demystifying the idea of the work of art and the creation process. Stingel challenges the viewer to reconsider their preconceived notions about what constitutes a legitimate source of art through the very act of its origin and creation. He challenges the idea of the hand of the artist by including others in the creation process in some of his works. Clearly influenced by Arte Povera, Stingel turns on its head the traditional structure of painting by using ordinary ubiquitous materials to create objects of fine art. The present lot is the result of a performative installation in which members of the public were allowed to deface the surface of temporary Celotex walls installed in public spaces. The resulting destruction and accumulation was then fragmented into many segments and then reassembled as a finished work of art to be exhibited in a gallery or museum. The additive and subtractive marks found across Stingel’s reflective surfaces become poignant tableaux of contemporary life elevating the mundane and the everyday to high art. The large scale and raw surface of Rudolf Stingel’s Untitled lends the work an immediatlt striking aesthetic. Stingel works with Celotex insulation board, a prefabricated material that ultimately enables him full artistic liberties as his appreciators participate in the ‘active’ art-making process. The art, here, is all in the residue left behind from participation: the graffiti marks and sketches, random acerbic quotes and doodle imagery, all evoke that solitary bathroom stall left to abandonment and desolation: “Stingel imports the sign-language of toilets, underpasses, and bus-stops into the museum, not by quoting and portraying it, but by turning the very act of so-called vandalism into a constitutive element of his art in the museum. Suddenly the path from the formal aesthetic abstraction to real-world social concretion is very short. But it is not illustrative and instrumental (like the model of interactivity commonly encountered in media art: the visitor as laboratory mouse), but interpretative and structural (suggesting independent decisions on usage and interpretation)” (J. Heiser, ‘Medium and Membrane’ in Parkett, Zurich/New York, 2006, no. 77, p. 125). But the present lot transcends the mundane and ultimately propels it forward amongst a larger consideration of Stingel’s impulses and place within contemporary art history: “With their cleanly finished edges, multiple and identical constituency parts, and austerity of material, the works play with the formal devices of Minimalism. But, through their trampled surfaces, they dispel any intimation of participating in that movement’s claims for a quasi-metaphysical purity or transcendence. Indeed, the scale and rectangular shape of the panels… suggest an artistic style antithetical to Minimalism – the contained spontaneity of Pollock’s dripped and poured paintings… So Stingel’s work traffics in the stylistic markers of Minimalism and Abstract Expressionism. But he reduces those markers to features of ordinary experience and leaves the animating theoretical and expressive impulses of both movements behind.” (J. Gilmore, Art in America, October, 2000) Stingel's paintings created by viewers inscribing graffi ti-like marks in walls clad in aluminum insulation panels succeed because the viewer associates the work with a mental image of gestural abstract surfaces employed by artists such as Jackson Pollock or Cy Twombly 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
Try LotSearch and its premium features for 7 days - without any costs!
Be notified automatically about new items in upcoming auctions.
Create an alert
.jpg "Source: Christie's")
.jpg "Source: Christie's")
