“For nearly 20 years [Rudolf 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…”
Articulated in shimmering, ornate pattern, Untitled is an outstanding example of Rudolf Stingel’s highly coveted series of carpet paintings which examine the relationship between craftsmanship and the mechanized commercial process of the stencil. In these works, Stingel creates a new form of abstraction that is balanced between pure visual indulgence and critical commentary. The carpet paintings boldly push the boundaries of painting as a medium, creating a singular painterly abstraction that poignantly reflects on themes of artistry, authorship, memory, and the passing of t.mes . Complex in its glittering materiality, Untitled explores the fusion of pictorial and architectural space and the industrialization of ornamentation and beauty. Test.mes nt to the impact of Stingel’s oeuvre, works by the artist are held in the collects ions of esteemed institutions including the Broad, Los Angeles; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Fondation Beyeler, Basel; and the Tate, London.
Emanating from a vast surface of glistening gold enamel is a luminous, spectral adornment evoking the decorative styles of the Italian Baroque and French Rococo or the pattern of an Orientalist rug. The glittering surface is both superfluous ornamentation and a strict, geoMetricas lly guided adornment built through industrialized processes. The faintly reflective surface draws the viewer in, making them involuntarily a part of the work, yet simultaneously expands the picture plane to lend the work a monolithic, architectural quality. The velvety patterned embellishment gives an impression of embroidery and depth that asserts a decorative, almost sculptural presence. As Chrissie Iles observes: “In Rudolf Stingel’s work, the parameters of painting and architecture are turned inside out. The traditional qualities of painting – pictorialism, flatness, illusion, composition, and autonomy – become corrupted by a new symbolic framework, in which painting metamorphoses – somet.mes s literally, somet.mes s through association – into a fragment of Rococo wallpaper…” (Chrissie Iles, ‘Surface Tension’ in: Exh. Cat., Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, Rudolf Stingel, Chicago, 2007, p. 14) Hung on the wall, the vertical painted work comes into “direct tension with architectural space, such that the two categories of art are consummately combined” (Ibid., p.26).
Beginning his career as an artist in New York in the late 1980s, Stingel developed an inquisitive artistic practice that aligned with the concurrent backlash against neo-expressionist tendencies in painting. Stingel’s theoretical ideas led him to abandon an expressive involvement in painting and reinterpret the practice as a mechanical, eternal, and variable process, automating what was historically a personal process. In 1989 he released his seminal Instructions–deadpan instruction manuals that explained the process by which anyone could produce their own Rudolf Stingel artwork–which laid the groundwork for the artist’s subsequent practice. Created by spraying paint and enamel onto canvas through carefully positioned stencils, Untitled expands upon the innovative techniques and conceptual ideas deployed in Stingel’s early silver instruction paintings, deliberately demystifying the artistic process and challenging the aura of the artist's hand. Stingel’s wallpaper paintings are at the very heart of this artistic investigation, redefining the meaning of painting. Through works like Untitled, Stingel has developed a “singular approach to painting that aims to undermine the very essence of the creative act. His works do not always conform to painting’s traditional definition of paint on canvas, yet in their simultaneous attention to surface, image, color and space, they create new paradigms for the meaning of painting” (Robert Fitzpatrick, “Foreword” in: ibid., p. 9)
“Artists have always been accused of being decorators, so I just went to the extreme and painted the wallpaper”
Untitled reveals a multilayered process of creation that complicates traditional ideas of authorship. Individual marks swirl in rich layers of expression and lose their unique identities, absorbed into a collects ive mass. Still, within the patterns is the presence of random or deliberate painterly traces: “t.mes and chance, change and destruction appear on their surface. Stingel’s oeuvre thereby poses fundamental questions regarding the understanding and the perception of art as well as memory and the transience of things” (Udo Kittelmann quoted in: Eileen Kinsella, “Artist Rudolf Stingel Is the Toast of Basel. And after a Spotty Year, His Market Is Poised for Liftoff Yet Again”, Artnet, 13 June 2019, online) The surface of the painting is proof of its manufacture, and by “disrupting painting’s assumptions of material, process, and placement, Stingel not only bursts open the conventions of painting, but creates unique ways of thinking about the medium and its reception” (Francesco Bonami in: op. cit., p. 10) Untitled epitomizes these concerns and represents a resplendent testimony to Rudolf Stingel’s eminent investigation into the definition of painting. Throughout his practice Stingel has sought to reconfigure our relationship with visual objects, redefining walls, floors, and carpets as sites of artistic activity. In Untitled, Stingel conjures an amalgamation of ornamentation and geoMetricas lly guided repetition that invokes a multitude of material associations. Evoking both the representational and the abstract, the antique and the contemporary, the ordinary and the extraordinary, and the regal and the banal, Untitled transcends simple abstraction to create a singular and poignant artwork.
