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Overview
With its colossal, shimmering surface emanating purple and silver hues, Untitled is an exquisite example of Rudolf Stingel’s abstract works – specifically his carpet installations and wallpaper paintings, which utilise familiar, decorative patterns to blend into their surroundings. Looming before the viewer like a fragment of a mural, fresco or wallpaper, Untitled combines the graphic power of its declarative colours, and the inconspicuous demeanour of its domestic likeness. Created by spraying paint and enamel onto canvas with meticulously positioned stencils, the composition demonstrates Stingel’s experimental approach to the medium, which he continually cultivated throughout his career, reaching its apotheosis with his celebrated series of Carpet Paintings. Deftly balanced between visual indulgence and critical commentary on image-making, the artist’s paintings from this period, as well as his subsequent gilded and ornamented formulations, work in the legacy of Gerhard Richter, Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg. Executed in 2011, the composition thematically presages one of Stingel's most prodigious and ambitious projects: his 2013 solo presentation at the Palazzo Grassi, Venice, wherein he lined most of the palazzo's spaces — the vast atrium and the two floors of enfiladed galleries overlooking it — with synthetic carpet boasting the repeated, enlarged facsimile of an Ottoman carpet.
'For nearly 20 years [Stingel] has made work that seduces the eye while also upending most notions of what, exactly, constitutes a painting, how it should be made and by whom … He combines a love of painting with the postmodern suspicion of it.' —Roberta Smith
Over the last four decades, Stingel has forged a unique visual language that evidences the symbiotic relationship between viewing and making. Perpetually interrogating the artistic process through a shrewd experimentation with textiles, metals, oil paint and stencils, the artist has offered a novel understanding of artistic authorship in postmodern times. Situated at the threshold of painterly craft and the conceptual readymade, the artist’s Carpet Paintings posit as the culmination of his artistic investigation – the apex of his imaginative and creative powers.
Installation view of Rudolf Stingel’s exhibition at Palazzo Grassi, 5 April – 31 December 2013. Photo: Barbara Zanon/Getty Images. ‘A Carpet is a Painting, A Painting is a Carpet’
Stingel’s vast carpet installations, most famously installed in Grand Central Terminal under the facetious name ‘Plan B’ in 2004, have become powerful visual symbols for his playful and inventive oeuvre. Echoing these large-scale, site-specific exercises, Stingel’s similarly themed paintings equally engage the viewer’s sense of awareness in relation to spatial environment. Rising high above the viewer’s eye, Untitled exemplifies the artist's ability to remain fastidiously attentive to detail and surface quality, whilst simultaneously combining graphic impact and physical grandeur. Utilising reproductions of traditional patterns, the artist infers a nostalgic and time‐worn effect that is immediately tied to the aesthetic attached to ornamental rugs. Transporting pattern to the forefront of his work, the artist draws inspiration from the rich history of decorative arts and architecture, celebrating the achievements of artisanal craftsmanship – a knowledge and fascination that can be traced back to his upbringing in the Italian Tyrol and Vienna, where he was exposed to a fusion of Baroque and Rococo aesthetics at an early age. As Francesco Bonami notes: ‘a carpet is a painting, and a painting is a carpet. It is only our position in relation to them that changes. Our relation to life, to a painting or to a carpet, is the same relation we have to the earth we stand on: it moves but we don’t feel it’.i
Hans Memling, Fleurs dans un vase (Flowers in a Jug), c. 1485, oil on wood, Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Madrid. Image: Bridgeman Images. i Francesco Bonami, quoted in Rudolf Stingel, exh. cat., Gagosian, New York, 2010, p. 7.
Provenance
Gagosian Gallery, New York
Acquired from the above by the present ownerArtist 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.
Property from a Private American Collection
33
Untitled
signed and dated 'Stingel 2011' on the reverse
oil and enamel on linen
241.7 x 193.2 cm (95 1/8 x 76 1/8 in.)
Executed in 2011.
Estimate
£800,000 - 1,200,000 ‡♠
Sold for £990,500
Kate Bryan
Specialist, Head of Evening Sale
+44 20 7318 4026
kbryan@phillips.com
20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale
London Auction 20 October 2020
1
Emily Mae Smith
Alien Shores
Estimate £40,000 - 60,000 ‡
Sold for £277,200
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2
Salman Toor
Aashiana (Hearth and Home)
Estimate £30,000 - 50,000 ‡
Sold for £138,600
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3
Portia Zvavahera
Arising from the Unknown
Estimate £40,000 - 60,000 ‡
Sold for £163,800
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4
Titus Kaphar
Alternate Endings
Estimate £60,000 - 80,000 ‡
Sold for £466,200
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5
Hernan Bas
Two Fruits
Estimate £60,000 - 80,000
Sold for £163,800
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6
Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe
Black Stripes on White
Estimate £20,000 - 30,000 ‡
Sold for £94,500
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7
Dana Schutz
Trump Descending an Escalator
Estimate £380,000 - 580,000 ‡
Sold for £688,000
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8
Banksy
Girl with Balloon & Morons Sepia
Estimate £500,000 - 700,000 ‡♠
Sold for £1,232,500
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9
Nicolas Party
Rocks
Estimate £400,000 - 600,000
Sold for £603,300
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10
Georg Baselitz
Das letzte Selbstbildnis I
Estimate £4,700,000 - 6,000,000 ♠
Sold for £4,983,500
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11
Jean-Michel Basquiat
Back of the Neck
Estimate £450,000 - 650,000 ‡
Sold for £627,500
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12
Keith Haring
Untitled (Grace Jones Mask)
Estimate £1,500,000 - 2,000,000 ‡
Sold for £1,716,500
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13
George Condo
The Age of Reason
Estimate £2,000,000 - 3,000,000 ‡
Sold for £2,082,369
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14
Alex Katz
Ada with Mirror
Estimate £400,000 - 600,000 ‡
Sold for £529,200
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15
Yoshitomo Nara
Magic Carpet
Estimate £500,000 - 700,000
Sold for £504,000
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16
Ed Ruscha
1981 - Future
Estimate £600,000 - 800,000
Sold for £567,000
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17
Jean-Michel Basquiat
Untitled (Pestus)
Estimate £2,000,000 - 3,000,000 ‡
Sold for £2,200,500
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18
Andy Warhol
Flowers
Estimate £1,400,000 - 1,800,000 ‡
Sold for £1,595,500
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19
Sir Peter Blake, R.A.
Nudina
Estimate £60,000 - 80,000 ♠
Sold for £75,600
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20
Allen Jones
Project for Fifteen Foot Women
Estimate £150,000 - 200,000 ♠
Sold for £189,000
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21
Sean Scully
Somebody's Angel
Estimate £600,000 - 800,000 ‡♠
Sold for £1,014,700
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22
Joan Mitchell
Untitled
Estimate £400,000 - 600,000
Sold for £441,000
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23
Cy Twombly
Portrait of Alvise di Robilant
Estimate £500,000 - 700,000 ‡
Sold for £510,300
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24
Alberto Giacometti
Femme debout
Estimate £550,000 - 750,000 ‡
Sold for £651,700
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25
Wojciech Fangor
M 91
Estimate £200,000 - 300,000 ♠
Sold for £252,000
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26
Georges Mathieu
Petite Torture infligée au Marquis de Coconat et à son complice la Môle
Estimate £250,000 - 350,000 ♠
Sold for £252,000
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27
Hurvin Anderson
Marlene’s
Estimate £250,000 - 350,000 ‡♠
Sold for £252,000
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28
This lot is no longer available.
29
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye
Luminary
Estimate £250,000 - 450,000 ♠
Sold for £315,000
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30
Henry Taylor
Ari and the Deer
Estimate £100,000 - 150,000 ‡
Sold for £113,400
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31
Georg Baselitz
Kopf an Kopf II
Estimate £600,000 - 800,000 ‡♠
Sold for £705,000
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32
Albert Oehlen
Control
Estimate £400,000 - 600,000 ‡♠
Sold for £475,000
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33
Rudolf Stingel
Untitled
Estimate £800,000 - 1,200,000 ‡♠
Sold for £990,500
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34
Albert Oehlen
Die Veränderungen
Estimate £700,000 - 900,000 ♠
Sold for £809,000
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35
Günther Förg
Untitled
Estimate £250,000 - 350,000 ♠
Sold for £315,000
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36
Anish Kapoor
Blade
Estimate £60,000 - 80,000 ‡♠
Sold for £85,680
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37
This lot is no longer available.
38
Jason Rhoades
Heroic Vagina
Estimate £150,000 - 200,000
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39
Wolfgang Tillmans
Freischwimmer 27
Estimate £210,000 - 300,000 ♠
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40
Cory Arcangel
Photoshop CS: 110 by 72 inches, 300 DPI, RGB, square pixels, default gradient 'Spectrum', mousedown y=23900 x=11650, mouseup y=32650 x=11650
Estimate £100,000 - 150,000 ‡
Sold for £252,000
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