Rudolf Stingel

Gagosian Paris is pleased to present an exhibition of new works by Rudolf Stingel.

Casting and plating large sections of graffiti-covered Celotex insulation panels, Stingel has produced opulent paintings that both celebrate and memorialize the passage of time. The original panels for these paintings come from the environmental installations of his mid-career retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and the Whitney Museum in New York in 2007. In each of these renowned participatory works, Stingel transformed the exhibition space by covering the walls in a layer of reflective aluminum-faced insulation material. Viewers were free to further transform the spaces by scratching, writing, and marking the pristine yet vulnerable material with whatever was at hand, leaving individual traces that were soon subsumed into the accumulated mass of marks that the space became. The new works are selected fragments of those inscribed walls cast in copper via a process that captures even the most delicate surface detail. The cast base is then electroplated with gold, transforming the random inscriptions alchemically and permanently into something new and shamelessly beautiful.

Central to Stingel’s oeuvre is the passage of time rendered palpable, together with the expansion of the vocabulary of painting and its perception: from the abstract silver tulle paintings of the 1990s to the carpet installations that aestheticized both the surface of spaces and visitors’ traces; from the series of melancholic self-portraits to the latest gold studio-floor paintings. Stingel’s artistic output is prolific and visually diverse, yet meticulous and generous in its offering. The new panel paintings are no exception—they are a new form of luxurious abstraction born of humble materials and mundane gestures.