Rudolf Stingel - Contemporary Art Evening Sale New York Thursday, May 16, 2013 | Phillips

Create your first list.

Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.

  • Provenance

    Van de Weghe Fine Arts, New York

  • Catalogue Essay

    “Silver makes everything look contemporary… If you paint something silver, it looks, I don’t know, from today.”
    RUDOLF STINGEL, 2004

    While painting is an action, it must also be an observation. 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’ in Rudolf Stingel, London, 2007, pp. 13-14)

    First recognized in the late 1980s for his monochromatic works, Rudolf Stingel has developed a singular approach to painting aiming to examine and reinvigorate the very
    essence of creative acts. Characterized by simultaneous attention to surface, image, color and space he creates new paradigms for the meaning of painting: Reflecting
    upon the fundamental questions concerning the practice today– authenticity, meaning, hierarchy and context. Stingel’s works form a unique approach, attempting to overcome the gap between figuration and abstraction, constantly negotiating a balance between kairos and kronos. That is, between the exact moment of time in which the viewer is confronted with the present – or its illusion for that matter – and the eternal time, which never ends but concludes in abstraction. Stingel thus moves painting one step further, understanding that it carries energy and consumes it, and that abstraction happens when the power goes of momentarily.

  • 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.

    View More Works

10

Untitled

1989
oil and enamel on canvas
65 5/8 x 44 in. (166.7 x 112 cm.)
Signed and dated "Stingel 89" on the reverse.

Estimate
$400,000 - 600,000 

Sold for $509,000

Contact Specialist
Zach Miner
Head of Sale
zminer@phillips.com
+1 212 940 1256

Contemporary Art Evening Sale

New York 16 May 2013 7pm