A sublime and poetic meditation on the nature of painting, Untitled is a luminous example of the conceptual and aesthetic concerns that have directed Rudolf Stingel throughout his career. Executed in 1993, Untitled encapsulates the achievements of the artist’s most iconic body of work. The present work is an early and outstanding example of Stingel’s seminal Instruction paintings, which radically question the status of the artist as the producer of his work. With its subtly textured surface and luscious washes of silver enamel paint, the seductive surface of the painting creates a captivating optical effect that is the perfect embodiment of Stingel's formal and conceptual explorations, fusing a theoretical approach to the medium with an undeniably sumptuous aesthetic.

The rich, silvery surface of Untitled is together both reductive and maximalist, demonstrating Stingel's awareness of the art historical legacies of periods as diverse as the Byzantine and Baroque, through to Modernism and Minimalism. Having first come to prominence in the 1980s with his monochromatic paintings, Stingel’s work has always reflected a preoccupation with challenging the authenticity, meaning, and hierarchy of painting in an effort to demystify artistic practice. Untitled maintains this concentration by challenging the primacy of painting and overlaying this traditional practice with shimmering enamel. In 1989, Stingel published Instructions; a step-by-step manual detailing the mechanised procedure used to create his works. Exhibited alongside a small sculpture of Buddha holding the tools used to create the Instruction Paintings, this satirical idol pokes fun at the reverence with which the painter’s process is regarded. Stingel’s Instructions recall Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings and Andy Warhol’s Do It Yourself paintings by welcoming reproduction as a legitimate expansion of a work into a series. As curator Francesco Bonami writes, in doing so, Stingel “erased the very idea of the copy because every painting, following his instructions, would have come out as a true original” (Francesco Bonami, ‘Paintings of Painting for Paintings; The Kairology and Kronology of Rudolf Stingel’, in: Exh. Cat., Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, Rudolf Stingel, 2007, p. 18).

The Instruction paintings thus simultaneously undermine the most basic assumptions about painting while insisting on the relevance of the medium. Here Stingel relies on a technique that involves the layering of thickly applied oil paint, tulle netting, and metallic enamel paint. Removing the netting after the final layer of paint has been applied, the surface takes on the textured appearance of the tulle; this process is what gives the Instruction paintings their characteristic aesthetic. Aligned with the documentary nature of his black and white portraiture, Stingel’s aberrant renunciation of his artist-hood through the Instructions deepens his investigation into the Modernist canon. Where Christopher Wool’s harsh, gritty stencils of floral motifs and provocative wordplay evoke the punk-spirit of New York in the 1980s, Stingel’s paintings evince a t.mes less quality; subjected to process, abstraction and design sublimate one another, becoming pure surface. In this sense, Stingel’s work “demonstrates an acute awareness of the aspirations, failures and challenges to Modernist painting, while at the same t.mes expressing a sincere belief in painting itself, focusing on formal characteristics including colour, gesture, composition, and, most importantly, surface” (Gary Carrion-Murayari, Rudolf Stingel, Ostfildern 2008, p. 111).

Untitled remains a painting at the root of Stingel’s aesthetic developments; a unique, subtle, lustrous mirage of paint, the present work demonstrates the exceptional coupling of process-based production and Stingel’s postmodern, theoretical rigour that continues to evolve. Citing both Modernist colour field painters and Conceptualist ideas, Untitled is a supreme example from Stingel’s earliest series that would come to identify him as one of the most important and innovative practitioners working today.