I wouldn’t know where to say intervention stops and destruction begins.
—Rudolf Stingel
From his captivatingly realistic oil paintings to his innovative use of Celotex, Styrofoam, carpet, and aluminum, Rudolf Stingel challenges traditional notions of what constitutes a painting. Often dealing with subjects of time, memory, and perception, he embraces industrial materials and ornamental design as vehicles for formal exploration and provoked coincidence, whereby the final state of certain installations is determined by the participation of the viewer.
Born in Merano, Italy, Stingel grew up in the Tyrolean Alps, a mountainous region where Austria, Italy, and Switzerland meet. In 1989, he completed Instructions, a limited-edition manual explaining (in several languages) how to make one of his silver paintings, abstract canvases with undertones of red, yellow, or blue. In his screenprints of these years, Stingel created impressions using folded and creased tulle, then sprayed over the compositions with silver spray paint.
In 1991, Stingel installed a bright orange carpet in Daniel Newberg Gallery, activating the space in an unprecedented way. Confronted with empty white walls, visitors instead could consider the pictorial qualities of the architectural interior. Two years later, at the Biennale di Venezia, Stingel installed a red-orange carpet on the wall, further commenting on the power of display. And in 2004, his site-specific installation Plan B incorporated Stingel’s career-long interest in patterns and repetition, covering the floors of Grand Central Terminal’s Vanderbilt Hall in industrially printed pink and blue floral carpet.
The tensions between wall and floor, tactility and illusion run throughout Stingel’s oeuvre. In 1994, he created a series of monochromatic works cast in polyurethane, rubber compound, aluminum, or bronze. Boldly colored, the works are cast from sections of shag carpets, yet they hang on the wall like minimalist paintings. These were followed by the Styrofoam works of the late nineties and early 2000s. Panels of pink, white, blue, or green Styrofoam (often featuring their industrial logos) become platforms for Stingel’s patterns and gestures: from more mechanical grids of circles and ellipses to meandering lines and footprints.
In 2001, for his solo exhibition at the Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Trento, Italy, Stingel lined every available surface of one of the rooms of the museum with metallic Celotex insulation board and visitors drew, wrote, and made imprints on the surface of the reflective silver paneling. Eschewing the preciousness of the artist’s unique mark in favor of the collective gestures of thousands of viewers, Stingel repeated this participatory installation at the 50th Biennale di Venezia (2003); Palazzo Grassi, Venice, (2006); and at his retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2007), which traveled to the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, later that year.
Since 2005 Stingel has been painting photorealistic portraits of himself and others, as well as captivating views of mountains and sunsets. His first series of photorealistic self-portraits, Untitled (After Sam) (2005–06), was painted after black-and-white photographs of Stingel taken by American photographer Sam Samore. These were followed by paintings based on photographs of Stingel as a young man, both in black-and-white and in color, each painting capturing details such as the scratches and creases of the original printed photographs. These works enter into dialogue with Stingel’s metallic paintings based on carpet patterns, Damask wallpaper, chain link fences, and more.
Stingel’s site-specific exhibitions have become increasingly immersive, as he transforms galleries and museums into total works of art. His exhibition Live at the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2010) included a wall-to-wall black-and-white carpet printed with an image of an Agra rug, a huge crystal chandelier, and hyperrealistic paintings of the Alps; and at Palazzo Grassi in 2013, he covered the floors and walls with a carpet printed with the pattern of an older Oriental rug, and hung both abstract and photorealistic paintings over it, creating a subdued, all-encompassing environment for his work.
In 2015 Stingel embarked on a series of eight consecutive installations at Gagosian’s Park & 75 gallery in New York, conceived as a single monumental exhibition. In Part I (2015) Stingel presented large oil paintings with multicolored impressions of a Chintamani carpet and a small portrait on paper of a youthful Franz West; Part II (2016) included gold paintings with a chain-link pattern, a small grisaille portrait of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and white wall-to-wall carpeting; in Part III (2016) featured large photorealist canvases layered with colorful carpet patterns; Part IV (2016) was a single silver monochrome triptych derived from images of Plan B at Grand Central; Part V (2016) paired a small photorealist portrait with ornate gold paintings; Part VI (2016) consisted of gleaming silver panels cast from sections of inscribed Celotex from previous installations; and both Part VII (2016) and Part VIII (2016–17) presented paintings based on a mural by Ludwig Bemelmans in New York’s Carlyle Hotel.
In 2017, for a private presentation at Casa Malaparte in Capri, Stingel showed multicolored, metallic canvases reminiscent of his early silver paintings—as if the earlier canvases were reflecting some of the spectral color of his more recent sunset works. Stingel’s series continue to build upon and depart from one another, expanding definitions of art and authorship along the way.
