“The subject is not the artist himself, but the bipolar state of the subject of painting. To view these self-portraits as a divergence from Stingel’s earlier work is a misstep. This new direction is merely one of many parallel avenues in his ongoing autobiography of painting.”

—Francesco Bonami

Painted in 2012, Untitled stands as a powerful example of Rudolf Stingel’s ongoing investigation into the mechanics of image-making and the conceptual structure of self-portraiture. Rendered with uncanny precision, the work is based on a weathered, decades-old photographic print of the artist—shirt open, gaze distant, seemingly lost in reverie. Stingel captures not only the figure, but every nuance of the worn source material: the faded tones of the paper, its surface creases, and even the ghostly imprints left by the bases of drinking glasses. It is an image layered with time—not only the time of the subject’s aging body, but the physical aging of the photograph itself—staged and re-presented through the medium of paint with haunting fidelity.

By 2012, Stingel had firmly established himself as one of the most conceptually astute and materially inventive painters of his generation. Following his celebrated 2007 solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and a landmark installation in the Palazzo Grassi during the Venice Biennale that same year, he had cemented a reputation for redefining the surface and subject of painting. His 2012 output reflects a mature phase of his practice: deeply self-reflexive, technically masterful, and unafraid to court contradiction—between personal narrative and distance, between image and object, between illusion and decay.

In this Untitled self-portrait, the artist continues his exploration of memory and identity as mutable constructs. The source image, already a document of a past self, arrives to us filtered through both time and mediation. That the original photograph shows signs of physical degradation is no accident—it is integral to the meaning of the work. By replicating every blemish, ring stain, and tonal shift of the print, Stingel shifts the viewer’s focus from the subject to the materiality of memory itself. The surface of the painting becomes an archaeological site, excavating not just the appearance of the artist, but the residue of a life lived, handled, and revisited.

Executed in a limited grayscale palette, the work preserves the photographic feel while simultaneously announcing its painterly artifice. The artist’s technique—meticulous yet expressive—imbues the surface with a soft haze, creating a spectral distance between viewer and image. The self becomes elusive, nearly abstracted, not through distortion but through hyper-specificity. As in earlier works, Stingel uses photorealism not to affirm presence but to destabilize it.

“Stingel remains part of a lineage of European painters who reinvent the medium without succumbing to nostalgia. His work is always in dialogue with time—moving between the photographic and the cinematic, the personal and the performative.”

—Gary Carrion-Murayari

Though seemingly autobiographical, Stingel’s self-portraits are acts of deliberate fiction. They resist confessional reading. The artist does not offer insight into his inner life, but rather reflects on the very impossibility of doing so. As curator Gary Carrion-Murayari has noted, Stingel’s use of photography as a mediating device severs the direct connection between artist and viewer, challenging the traditional intimacy of self-portraiture. In this painting, the separation is intensified by the use of a found photograph, likely not taken by the artist himself, further complicating the question of authorship.

The resulting image hovers between nostalgia and performance, revealing the artist not as subject but as actor—playing the role of himself in a constructed, cinematic mise-en-scène. Echoing Fellini’s 8½, this is autobiography rendered through stylized artifice, not disclosure. The work becomes a reflection not of the self, but of the process by which the self is remembered, recorded, and mythologized.

With Untitled, Stingel extends his ongoing interrogation of the painted surface and the cultural meaning of image. At once intensely personal and coolly detached, it is a work that reflects on time’s passage—on aging, memory, and the instability of identity—while reinforcing the painter’s place as one of contemporary art’s most complex and compelling figures.