Rudolf Stingel - Contemporary Art Part I New York Thursday, May 13, 2010 | Phillips

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  • Provenance


    Paula Cooper Gallery, New York

  • Catalogue Essay


    Throughout the last seven centuries, moments of profound change have been articulated aesthetically through ruptures in the illusionistic space of painting and its relationship to architectural space. In Rudolf stingel’s work, the parameters of painting and architecture are turned inside out. The traditional qualities of painting—pictorialism, flatness illusion, composition, autonomy—become corrupted by a new symbolic framework, in which painting metamorphoses— sometimes literally, sometimes through association—into a fragment of rococo wallpaper or stucco wall, a mirrored floor, a thick rectangle of Styrofoam trampled by footprints, an oversized photograph, or a dirty carpet. Stingel’s dislocation produces a disturbing sense of artifice—an un-natural state that, in the nineteenth century, was deemed decadent and morally suspect.
    C. Iles, “Surface Tension,” Rudolf Stingel, Chicago, 2007
    With stunning gilded polish, the present lot references Stingel’s earlier project Plan B, 2004, a two-pronged installation in which the artist used an industrially manufactured carpet with a standard floral design, but in the striking colors of electric blue roses on a hot pink background, to cover the Beaux-Arts hall in New York’s Grand Central Station and also the lobby and outdoor plaza of the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Stingel’s signature engagement with the parameters of painting were carried out in Plan B to essentially make the plane of the ground a painting, and here in the present lot he brings that ground back on to the wall again. The illusionistic rendering of the carpet pattern receding in space plays against the flatness of Stingel’s iconic gold to create a painting brilliant in both concept and beauty.

  • 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

103

Untitled (Plan B)

2008

Oil and enamel on linen.

95 x 76 in. (241.3 x 193 cm).
Signed “Stingel 2008” on the reverse.

Estimate
$300,000 - 400,000 

Sold for $602,500

Contemporary Art Part I

13 May 2010
New York