Untitled, 2012, oil and enamel on canvas, 67 1/64 × 53 1/2 in.
©Foto Massimo Listri
Rudolf Stingel (Merano 1956)
He went to the art school in Val Gardena and in 1987, after short stays in Vienna and Milan, decided to settle in the United States, although, with his two studios in Merano and New York, he has not severed his connection to his homeland. In 1989, he published Instructions, a manual in six languages for the correct creation of his abstract works. His research focuses on the relations between abstraction and figuration, dealing with profound existential themes, such as memory, time and the vanity of things. In 1991, he began to create his ‘moquette’ series, pictorial installations which cover entire rooms and offer an immersive experience, inviting the viewers to develop a visual and tactile relationship with the artwork. His production is prolific and multifaceted, as some photorealistic portraits or self-portraits of various sizes demonstrate. He was part of the Venice Biennale in 1993 and 2003 and important collective exhibitions, including those at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (1999), Guggenheim Museum of New York (2004), the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (2012). Among the venues of his solo shows: MART (2001), Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt (2004), Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and Whitney Museum of New York (2007), Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin (2010), Wiener Secession in Vienna (2012), Palazzo Grassi in Venice (2013), Beyeler Foundation in Riehen (2019). His works are hosted by prestigious institutions, such as MAXXI in Rome, Museion in Bolzano, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, Whitney Museum in New York, Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Centre Pompidou and the François Pinault collection in Paris, Tate Modern in London, Beyeler Foundation in Riehen, Moderna Museet in Stockholm. He received the President of the Italian Republic Award for painting in 2018.
Since the beginning of his practice in the 1980s, Rudolf Stingel has been engaged with fundamental questions about the material parameters of painting and space. In Stingel’s hands, traditional qualities of painting––flatness, verticality, autonomy––are turned inside out, re-calibrating the relationship between pictorial space and material surface. His approach to the surface is always paradoxical. As much as he asserts the deadpan materiality of each painting, he is also deeply interested in its seductive, tactile qualities. In Untitled (2012) Stingel continues to throw the logic of horizontal and vertical planes into question, painting a photographic image of a Turkish Sivas rug onto a canvas whose orientation is unquestionably vertical. The rug appears as a ghostly photographic trace, its original materiality re-confirmed as a painterly ornamental presence by Stingel’s rich, delicately layered surface. Like the decorative language of Bavarian Rococo which informed Stingel’s early training and upbringing in the Italian Tyrol, the pattern of the rug is asserted as a pictorial subject, infusing the trace of its photographic imprint with a palpable sense of its past material presence and meaning. (Excerpt from a text by Dr. Chrissie Iles, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Curator, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York)