Rudolf Stingel - Contemporary Art Day Sale New York Friday, May 11, 2012 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Galleria Massimo de Carlo, Milan

  • Exhibited

    New York, Paula Cooper Gallery, Rudolf Stingel, October - November 1994 (another variant exhibited)
    Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, Rudolf Stingel, January 27 - May 27, 2007 (another variant exhibited)
    New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Rudolf Stingel, June 28 - October 14, 2007 (another variant exhibited)

  • Literature

    B. Brgi, Rudolf Stingel, exh. cat., Kunstalle Zurich, 1995, pp. 13, 15 (another variant illustrated)
    F. Bonami, RUDOLF STINGEL, New Haven, 2007, pp. 3, 37, 69, 71, 79, 99, 117, 133, 157, 181, 201, 237 (another variant illustrated)

  • Catalogue Essay

    Rudolf Stingel’s associations with the Buddha are longstanding. His father, a frequent traveler to India, would bring back small Buddha figurines from the Asian continent with which he would play with as a boy. The present lot, Untitled, 1994, was fashioned to be Stingel’s own version of an Asian deity, one that blended the meditative Buddha from his childhood memories with the multi-armed Hindu deities like Siva or Vishnu. Cast in rubber and made in 24 different colors, each of the deity’s six arms holds a tool from his how-to Untitled (Instructions), 1989, in which the artist details the step-by-step process required to create one of his early abstract paintings: a wide brush, scissors to cut tulle, a mixer, a spray gun, a wallpaper spatula, and a tube of paint. While the Buddha figure is a universal symbol of enlightenment, Stingel’s creation acts as his own symbol of artistic enlightenment, holding all of the elements for a successful work of art and thereby making the creative process available to all.

  • Artist Biography

    Rudolf Stingel

    Italian • 1956

    Rudolf Stingel came to prominence in the late 1980s for his insistence on the conceptual act of painting in a context in which it had been famously declared dead. Despite the prevailing minimalist and conceptual narrative of the time, the Italian-born artist sought to confront the fundamental aspirations and failures of Modernist painting through the very medium of painting itself. While his works do not always conform to the traditional definitions of painting, their attention to surface, space, color and image provide new and expanded ways of thinking about the process and "idea" of painting. Central to his multifarious and prolific oeuvre is an examination of the passage of time and the probing of the fundamental questions of authenticity, meaning, hierarchy, authorship and context by dislocating painting both internally and in time and space. Stingel is best known for his wall-to-wall installations, constructed of fabric or malleable Celotex sheets, as well as his seemingly more traditional oil-on-canvas paintings.

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145

Untitled

1994
cast urethane rubber
18 x 21 x 9 in. (45.7 x 53.3 x 22.9 cm)
This work is from a series of twenty-four variants, each unique in color. The work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity issued by Galleria Massimo de Carlo.

Estimate
$150,000 - 200,000 

Sold for $152,500

Contemporary Art Day Sale

Contemporary Art Day
11 May 2012
New York