Beschreibung:

Property of an Important European Collector Rudolf Stingel Untitled 1994 cast urethane rubber 18 1/2 x 20 1/8 x 9 in. (47 x 51 x 22.9 cm) Signed and dated "Stingel 94" on the underside. This work is from a series of 24 uniquely colored variants.
Provenance Massimo De Carlo, Milan Exhibited New York, Paula Cooper Gallery, Rudolf Stingel October - November 1994 (another example exhibited) Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, Rudolf Stingel January 27 - May 27, 2007 (another example exhibited) New York, The Whitney Museum of American Art, Rudolf Stingel June 28 - October 14, 2007 (another example exhibited) Literature Bernhard Mendes Bürgi, ed. Rudolf Stingel exh. cat., Kunstalle Zurich, 1995, pp. 13, 15 (another example illustrated) Francesco Bonami RUDOLF STINGEL New Haven, 2007, p. 3, 37, 69, 71, 79, 99, 117, 133, 157, 181, 201, 237 (another example illustrated) Catalogue Essay “Zen is about acceptance, right?” Mr. Stingel said. “So that’s the way it is. I do sit and look at him sometimes — we have a meaningful relationship. You can’t get over it. You just live with it.” - Rudolph Stingel Rudolf Stingel’s affinity for the decorative is a consistent theme throughout the artist’s multi-faceted oeuvre of painting, drawing and sculpture. Stingel’s Buddha sculptures, composed of cast rubber, fit this decorative mold, lacking the overt spirituality of other representations of the Asian deity. In an interview from 2007 regarding his Buddha statues, he says “I don’t think it has anything to do with religion. It’s pure decoration. It’s a taste, a lifestyle” (Rudolf Stingel quoted in David Coleman "Not a Believer but Just in Case Om", in The New York Times, July 2007). Thus, Stingel’s twenty-four uniquely colored variants of which the present lot belongs exist as ironic symbols of the modernity of spirituality in a world of mass-produced decoration. In Untitled, 1994, the meditative Buddha depicted is the six-armed Hindu deity Vishnu who holds tools from the artist’s 1998 Untitled (Instructions), a how-to manual in which he explains the process used to create one of his early abstract paintings. The deity holds these objects as if ready to use the pair of electric hand mixers, scissors, a tube of paint, and a series of brushes. These objects are the same bright color of the Buddha himself, sculpted in a smooth and simple finish. With eyes closed, Stingel portrays the meditation central to the Buddhist religion and in turn, calls attention to his own painting practice as being meditative in itself. Therefore, in typical Stingel fashion, the resulting sculpture derives its imagery equally from the past and present, referencing the ancient religion from which it is derived while simultaneously looking to modern art practices in self-referential testimony. 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