Beschreibung:

Rudolf Stingel Untitled 2007 oil on canvas 95 x 76 in. (241.3 x 193 cm) Signed and dated "Stingel 2007" on the reverse.
Provenance Paula Cooper Gallery, New York Private Collection, 2007 Catalogue Essay “I am demonstrating that using different surfaces, we can produce very diverse environments.” Rudolf Stingel 2004 Italian-born artist Rudolf Stingel has accrued international acclaim due to his concentrated reinvestigation of painting as an artistic archetype. Working in New York since the late 1980s, Stingel challenges notions of authenticity, hierarchy, meaning, and context in his exceedingly diverse artistic output. Stingel’s work can be photorealistic, at times abstract and elsewhere wholly immersive. While his paintings are aesthetically striking, and entice the spectator with their exquisite beauty, they are also grounded in refined, conceptual approach. In Untitled, 2007, Stingel revolutionizes surface. The work employs a silvery grey scale, where infinite tonal subtleties interact to create a highly decorative plane. The effect is one of spellbinding visual opulence. The silvery canvas, measuring nine by six feet, exceeds human scale and engulfs the spectator with near sublime power. Untitled does not present a uniform surface. Rather, scores of crinkling folds accent the composition and call the work away from the two-dimensionality that historically characterizes painting. With the present lot, Stingel presents the viewer with a seductive tactility that brings Untitled into an altogether different realm. Rather than offering a window onto a different reality, the present lot brilliantly asserts itself, in modernist fashion, within the space it occupies. Taking on a near-sculptural quality, Untitled is a work that makes a physical impression upon its viewer. The rippling creases are manipulated by Stingel to cohere within a larger system of harmonious, compositional balance. Stingel’s artistic influences are manifold and solidify his rightful place within the developmental narrative of painting in the modern and contemporary arena. The atmospheric quality of the present lot, and the way in which Stingel skillfully manipulates shades of silver-grey, recall the color field contributions of Mark Rothko The textural, almost wiped-away appearance of Untitled also brings to mind the graphic work of painter Christopher Wool The vigor of Abstract Expressionism is revitalized in Untitled, as the spectator is left to scan the surface of the canvas, without the prescriptive direction of a hierarchical composition. Stingel uses the massive scale first championed by Abstract Expressionist painters, ensuring that the viewer becomes completely lost in an expressive, silver-grey void. The layered pleats of monochromatic painter Piero Manzoni are brought to mind when looking at how, in Untitled, Stingel hints at texture in two-dimensional painting. Stingel’s line of aesthetic inquiry takes inspiration, but also departs from that of his predecessors. Critic Jerry Saltz said of Stingel’s practice: “Stingel has always gone to extremes, making good-looking, self-referential paintings about painting that somehow manage to both parody and glorify the process while corralling vast amounts of the impinging world in the form of social politics, humor, uncommon beauty and something menacing.” (J. Saltz, “The Icon and the Iconoclast,” Village Voice, Published March 1, 2005). Indeed, Stingel’s diverse artistic ventures can be united by a commitment to rethinking and expanding the definition of painting. Stingel is widely known for his manual titled “Instructions,” conceived in 1989, in which he explains how to technically construct a “Stingel-painting.” In this project, the artist deconstructs his own authorship, thus democratizing the practice of artistic production. Stingel reduces his work to the mere execution of a set of steps, placing his oeuvre within the realm of conceptual art. In contrast, Stingel is also renowned for his large-scale installations that invite spectators to scratch and mark the surface of reflective insulation foil. In 2007 these intera