Rudolf Stingel - Contemporary Art Part I New York Thursday, November 15, 2007 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Massimo de Carlo Arte Contemporanea, Milan

  • Catalogue Essay

    With Stingel’s paintings there is great audacity. He defies cultural notions of the artist as heroic individual, and modes of making. In 1989 he published a ‘how to’ book, a highly detailed instructional manual for producing a painting, and offering a more collaborative act, a more democratic experience that further engages the viewer. It is of the potential, in what may be made rather an independent finished canvas..., “To comprehend why Stingel’s practice is not painting as a medium, or painting for the sake of painting, or even the self-mocking of painting, but the celebration of painting as the derma, or skin, of reality, a very thin surface where we can leave our marks, which are not necessarily always art. Stingel’s art is not Stingel’s painting. Stingel’s art is the understanding of painting as the impossibility of creating of creating a ‘Painting’, and not only and endlessly creating, like Sisyphus, an infinite series of paintings as a self-portrait of painting...,” (F. Bonami, Rudolf Stingel, New Haven and London, 2007, p. 17).

  • 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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2

Untitled

1989
Oil and enamel on canvas.
65 3/4 x 45 1/4 in. (167 x 114.9 cm).
Signed and dated “Stingel 89” on the reverse.

Estimate
$120,000 - 180,000 

Sold for $713,000

Contemporary Art Part I

15 Nov 2007, 7pm
New York