Beschreibung:

Rudolf Stingel Untitled 1996-97 oil on canvas 98 x 67 in. (248.9 x 170.2 cm.) Signed and dated "Stingel 97" on the reverse.
Provenance Paula Cooper Gallery, New York Exhibited New York, Paula Cooper Gallery, Rudolf Stingel January 15 – February 22, 1997 Literature J. Saltz, "Rudolf Stingel: Reviews," Time Out New York, February 13-20, 1997, p. 44 (illustrated) R. Francis, "Rudolf Stingel," Artforum, Vol. XXVI, No. 8, April 1997, p. 90 (illustrated) F. Bonami ed., Rudolf Stingel Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007, p. 107 (illustrated) Catalogue Essay “I wanted to be against a certain way of painting. Artists have always been accused of being decorative. I just went to the extreme.” - Rudolf Stingel Rudolf Stingel’s persistent pursuit of the boundaries of painting is unparalleled by any other contemporary artist’s. By exploring an artwork’s productive means and its relationship to the space it inhabits, Stingel calls upon the viewer to directly interact with the object and reconsider the definition of the process of painting. To Stingel, a true painting is not simply the result of moving a brush over a piece of canvas, however well, but the result of careful observation. Painting should be used as a means of observing and understanding reality in order to fashion a new one. This elevated notion is both elusive and profoundly simple. Concentrating on formal elements of the artistic process such as color, surface and gesture, his work acknowledges and exposes the challenges faced by modernist painting. “Stingel creates a transitive way to recede from abstraction into the subject and to push the subject into a different kind of time.” (F. Bonami, ed., "Painting of Paintings for Paintings," in Rudolf Stingel exh. cat., Chicago, 2007, pp. 13-14) In the present lot, Untitled, of 1996-97, the canvas is composed of undiluted oil paint, creating a visually-heightened surface tension which departs from Stingel’s earlier multi-layered transparent works. In works from this series, his process is initiated by applying a dense layer of paint across the entire canvas. He then places gauze that has been sprayed in paint directly on the surface. The gauze is later eliminated from the work, leaving only the imprint of paint behind. In Untitled, the canvas has been coated in an eye-catching hazard-sign orange and overlaid with jet black painted gauze; upon removal of the gauze the orange and the black have mingled and the swatches of black paint are ethereal yet explosive in their depths of negativity – a veritable collection of cosmic black-holes manifested in paint. Stingel has created a highly activated composition that dazzlingly sweeps across the canvas. While the surface appears to have been created by a performative act, akin to Pollock’s splashes of paint, it is instead a carefully negotiated process, perhaps more comparable to the screenprinting of Pop Art. Though Stingel’s works vary in medium—from Styrofoam to carpet—and in process, they are nevertheless identified as “paintings” because of their unique painterly surfaces. Interestingly, in each, his process seems to be a contradiction of sorts, an addition of negatives. As opposed to layering paint on paint, swathed by de Kooning or squeezed and scratched by Twombly, Stingel very intentionally builds his paintings by adding negativity – whether by stomping out Styrofoam or, as in this case, by adding these shadows of paint applied with gauze. “Each painting is an act of rebellion, but also one of the many parts of an ongoing revolution to free painting from the tyranny of mundane representation or color field annihilation.” (F. Bonami, ed., "Painting of Paintings for Paintings," in Rudolf Stingel exh. cat., Chicago, 2007, p. 16) Gaining exploratory knowledge from each series of works he creates, Stingel is consistently beginning anew, though the memory of past painted experiences remains evident. As Bonami writes, “This is why Stingel’s work cannot be analyzed with an autopsy but instead needs to be seen as a series of connections, a chain reaction of possible pa