Beschreibung:

PROPERTY FROM AN IMPORTANT PRIVATE EUROPEAN COLLECTION Rudolf Stingel Untitled 2002 Celotex insulation, aluminum foil on board, in 2 parts 95 5/8 x 92 7/8 in. (243 x 236 cm.) Signed and dated "Stingel 2002" twice on the reverse.
Provenance Sadie Coles HQ, London Christie's, London, Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Auction, June 30, 2009, lot 38 Acquired at the above sale by the present owner Catalogue Essay “Stingel's work is an X ray of his memory, of the memory of his painting. The real thing, the physical object, or the real person has already disappeared, irradiated by time” - Rudolf Stingel 2011 Untitled, 2002, exemplifies in Rudolf Stingel’s oeuvre a perfect fusion of sculpture and painting. As a member of Stingel’s landmark series in which he placed aluminum foil over top of celotex board, then allowed his observers to mark them as he pleased, Stingel blurs the line between the artist and observer. As a recurrent theme in his celebrated thirty-year career in visual art, Stingel has increasingly placed the onus of meaning within the observer’s own familiar environment, either in artistic manipulation of tapestry or in the viewer’s ability to form the piece through his own graffiti. The present lot is a perfect model for understanding Stingel’s gradually shifting use of the verb “paint.” Here, it is defined by the formation of a new reality by the hand of the observer: “The mere act of painting does not create a painting but simply some painting. But if the action of painting is used as a lens to observe reality to create another reality, then we have a painting…Stingel creates a transitive way to recede from abstraction into the subject and to push the subject into a different kind of time.” (Francesco Bonami ed., 'Paintings of Paintings for Paintings—The Kairology and Kronology of Rudolf Stingel', Rudolf Stingel London, 2007, pp. 13-14). The X-ray mentioned above is a memory itself; the creation of Untitled, 2002, was a mere moment in time, allowing for the development of the piece by a variety of onlookers. In allowing us a look into this fleeting moment, Stingel has made use of the most abundant form of paint: time. 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