Rudolf Stingel - Contemporary Art Part I New York Thursday, May 15, 2008 | Phillips

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  • Provenance


    Galleria Massimo De Carlo, Milan; Emily Tsingou Gallery, London 

  • Catalogue Essay


    There are no explanatory notices in sight, no members of staff encouraging the viewer to leave traces in Stingel’s space. But from the moment one sets foot on the Celotex boards, one is involved in the work, as the boards are so sensitive that, in this case, “viewing” can clearly be equated with “using” and even “Being worn out.” One leaves traces involuntarily–from there, it is only a small step to the deliberate act. It is as if Stingel has created a wormhole in the time-space continuum between the hallowed halls of the museum and the waiting room at a downat- the-heels subrurban railway station where generations of bored commuters and schoolchildren have immortalized themselves with scratched messages: names of bands, matchstick men, so-and-so “was here,” maybe a declaration of love, obscenities perhaps, or a fit of creativity –a quickly executed portrait, a thoughtful poem. It is an anarcho-democratic, self-regulating semiotic order where unconscious and the conscious, the crazy and the rational, relate to eachother. Stingel imports this sign– language of toilets, underpasses, and bus-stops into the museum, not by quoting and portraying it, but by turning the very act of so-called vandalism into a constitutive element of his art in the museum.Jörg Heiser, “Rudolf Stingel: Medium and Membrane,” Parkett, no. 77, Zurich, 2006, p.125

  • 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

163

Untitled

2003
Celotex Tuff R mounted on canvas.
46 3/8 x 63 in. (117.8 x 160 cm).

Estimate
$400,000 - 600,000 

Sold for $481,000

Contemporary Art Part I

15 May 2008, 7pm
New York