Provenance
Paula Cooper Gallery, New York; Georg Kargl Fine Art, Vienna
Catalogue Essay
Over the last three decades, Rudolf Stingel has built an impressive oeuvre demystifying the idea of the work of art and the creation process. Stingel challenges the viewer to reconsider their preconceived notions about what constitutes a legitimate source of art through the very act of its origin and creation. He challenges the idea of the hand of the artist by including others in the creation process in some of his works. Clearly influenced by Arte Povera, Stingel turns on its head the traditional structure of painting by using ordinary ubiquitous materials to create objects of fine art. The present lot is the result of a performative installation in which members of the public were allowed to deface the surface of temporary Celotex walls installed in public spaces. The resulting destruction and accumulation was then fragmented into many segments and then reassembled as a finished work of art to be exhibited in a gallery or museum. The additive and subtractive marks found across Stingel’s reflective surfaces become poignant tableaux of contemporary life elevating the mundane and the everyday to high art.
The large scale and raw surface of Rudolf Stingel’s Untitled lends the work an immediatlt striking aesthetic. Stingel works with Celotex insulation board, a prefabricated material that ultimately enables him full artistic liberties as his appreciators participate in the ‘active’ art-making process. The art, here, is all in the residue left behind from participation: the graffiti marks and sketches, random acerbic quotes and doodle imagery, all evoke that solitary bathroom stall left to abandonment and desolation: “Stingel imports the 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. Suddenly the path from the formal aesthetic abstraction to real-world social concretion is very short. But it is not illustrative and instrumental (like the model of interactivity commonly encountered in media art: the visitor as laboratory mouse), but interpretative and structural (suggesting independent decisions on usage and interpretation)” (J. Heiser, ‘Medium and Membrane’ in Parkett, Zurich/New York, 2006, no. 77, p. 125).
But the present lot transcends the mundane and ultimately propels it forward amongst a larger consideration of Stingel’s impulses and place within contemporary art history: “With their cleanly finished edges, multiple and identical constituency parts, and austerity of material, the works play with the formal devices of Minimalism. But, through their trampled surfaces, they dispel any intimation of participating in that movement’s claims for a quasi-metaphysical purity or transcendence. Indeed, the scale and rectangular shape of the panels… suggest an artistic style antithetical to Minimalism – the contained spontaneity of Pollock’s dripped and poured paintings… So Stingel’s work traffics in the stylistic markers of Minimalism and Abstract Expressionism. But he reduces those markers to features of ordinary experience and leaves the animating theoretical and expressive impulses of both movements behind.” (J. Gilmore, Art in America, October, 2000)
Stingel's paintings created by viewers inscribing graffi ti-like marks in walls clad in aluminum insulation panels succeed because the viewer associates the work with a mental image of gestural abstract surfaces employed by artists such as Jackson Pollock or Cy Twombly.
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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PROPERTY FROM THE VALENCIA CONTEMPORARY ART COLLECTION

8

Rudolf Stingel

Untitled

2002
Celotex insulation and aluminium foil on board in four parts.
Each: 121 x 236 cm (47 1/2 x 93 in) Overall: 242 x 472 cm (95 x 186 in).
Signed and dated 'Stingel 2002' on the reverse of each panel.

Estimate
£300,000 - 500,000 ♠

Sold for £361,250

Contemporary Art Evening Sale

17 Feb 2011
London

1
Wade Guyton
Untitled
Estimate £50,000 - 70,000
Sold for £213,650
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2
Mary Heilmann
Rude Boy
Estimate £70,000 - 90,000 ‡
Sold for £103,250
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3
Jim Lambie
Night Divides the Day
Estimate £40,000 - 60,000 ♠
Sold for £91,250
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4
Lucio Fontana
Concetto spaziale, Attesa
Estimate £400,000 - 600,000
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5
Günther Uecker
Mutation
Estimate £150,000 - 200,000 ♠
Sold for £223,250
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6
Robert Morris
Felt
Estimate £200,000 - 300,000
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7
Georg Herold
Untitled
Estimate £40,000 - 60,000 ♠
Sold for £121,250
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8
Rudolf Stingel
Untitled
Estimate £300,000 - 500,000 ♠
Sold for £361,250
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9
Peter Fischli and David Weiss
4 Hostessen (4 Stewardesses)
Estimate £250,000 - 350,000 ♠
Sold for £277,250
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10
Rudolf Stingel
Untitled
Estimate £350,000 - 550,000 ‡♠
Sold for £337,250
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11
Jean-Michel Basquiat
Overrun
Estimate £1,000,000 - 1,500,000 ‡
Sold for £1,127,650
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12
Raqib Shaw
Absence of God III... And His Tears of Blood Will Drown the Cities of Men II
Estimate £600,000 - 800,000 ‡
Sold for £553,250
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13
Anselm Reyle
Harmony
Estimate £120,000 - 180,000 ♠
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14
Anselm Reyle
Untitled
Estimate £70,000 - 100,000 ♠
Sold for £79,250
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15
Subodh Gupta
No. 1
Estimate £150,000 - 200,000 ‡
Sold for £121,250
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16
Donald Judd
Untitled (89-30)
Estimate £120,000 - 180,000 ‡
Sold for £169,250
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17
Ilya Kabakov and Emilia Kabakov
The Painting on an Easel
Estimate £400,000 - 600,000 ♠
Sold for £361,250
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18
Michelangelo Pistoletto
Ritratto sigg. Lerre (Portrait of Mr. Lerre)
Estimate £70,000 - 90,000 ♠
Sold for £67,250
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19
Martin Kippenberger
Mirror for Hang-Over Bud
Estimate £150,000 - 200,000
Sold for £145,250
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20
Robert Rauschenberg
Address Unknown
Estimate £250,000 - 350,000 ‡
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21
Martin Kippenberger
Untitled
Estimate £200,000 - 300,000 ‡
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22
Albert Oehlen
Untitled
Estimate £100,000 - 150,000 ♠
Sold for £193,250
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23
Karel Appel
Birds Over the Red Sea
Estimate £200,000 - 300,000 ‡
Sold for £205,250
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24
Victor Vasarely
Cassiopée II NB
Estimate £100,000 - 150,000 ‡
Sold for £157,250
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25
Arnaldo Pomodoro
Disco con Sfera
Estimate £60,000 - 80,000 ♠
Sold for £61,250
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26
Bill Viola
Basin of Tears
Estimate £150,000 - 250,000 Ω
Sold for £181,250
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27
Marlene Dumas
Equality
Estimate £80,000 - 120,000 ♠
Sold for £121,250
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28
Dan Colen
Wouldn't it be Nice
Estimate £20,000 - 30,000 †
Sold for £85,250
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29
Martin Creed
Work no. 230 (Don’t Worry)
Estimate £30,000 - 40,000 ♠
Sold for £51,650
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Contemporary Art Evening Sale

17 Feb 2011 London

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Provenance

Catalogue Essay

Artist Biography

Rudolf Stingel

8

Rudolf Stingel

Untitled

Contemporary Art Evening Sale

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17 Feb 2011
London