Beschreibung:

Rudolf Stingel Untitled 2000 Styrofoam in four parts. 121.9 x 244.1 x 9.9 cm (48 x 96.1 x 3.9 in).
Provenance Paula Cooper Gallery, New York Exhibited New York, Paula Cooper Gallery, Rudolf Stingel April - June 2000 Literature Exh. Cat., Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, Rudolf Stingel 2007, pp. 142-143 (illustrated) Catalogue Essay Through his instructional photographs, sculptural installations and industrially produced paintings, Stingel’s work explores the essence of making, gesture, and expression, questioning authenticity and authorship. Often inviting the audience to interact with his work, Stingel promulgates the artistic process, allowing his artworks to develop as public ‘collaborations’. Through reconsidering the appreciation of aesthetics as a relational experience, Stingel challenges ideas of cultural hierarchy, modes of production, and the mythology of the artist. The present lot, a large scale four panel white Styrofoam footprint painting from 2000, is undeniably reminiscent of and influenced by the oeuvre of the great European monochromists like Yves Klein and Piero Manzoni and of gestural painters like Albert Oehlen and Christopher Wool But at the same time it can be understood as an Americanized, Warholian version of Arte Povera. Like his Italian predecessors Stingel often favors cheap materials, but instead of being distressed they are always brand new, industrial and somehow implicitly American. The present lot was created through a performative process in which Stingel covered the entire floor of his studio with Styrofoam and then walked across the thick surface in boots dipped in lacquer thinner. Like walking across fresh, virginal snow, the Styrofoam melted with each of Stingel’s steps leaving behind only the markings of a footprint. The final work is then arranged in single, double or as in this case a monumentous four panels taken from the much larger field of panels that covered the entire studio floor. The resulting conjunction of abstraction and figuration, although created using banal industrial materials, nevertheless remains extremely elegant and poetic. Romantic associations are abound with the pure, white, virginal surface sullied by Stingel’s gestures, a process and intent reminiscent of the American conceptual painter Robert Ryman Like Ryman, Stingel presents the materials of his art at face value and conceptually explores the act of painting as a self-reflective metaphor for perception and memory. As repositories of chance marks and gestures, Stingel’s ' canvas’- the white styrofoam panels- draw attention to their own materiality. Yet they also possess an abstract iridescence and disarming ethereality reminiscent of the work of the greatest of all Italian post-war painters Lucio Fontana 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