拍品專文
With its diaphanous and detailed surface, Untitled is a monumental example of Rudolf Stingel’s Baroque-inspired works. Executed in 2010, the same year as the artist’s solo presentation at the Neue National Galerie in Berlin, Untitled is captivating, at once ornamental and architectural, painterly and decorative. Across the canvas’ large expanse is an array of arabesques, elegant swirls, and lacy curlicues, each as painstaking and delicate as if it had been hand embroidered. The patterning evokes visions of sumptuous textiles and lavish interiors, yet everything here has been rendered in gleaming silver paint.
The embellished opulence of Untitled chimes with Stingel’s long-held interest in Baroque and Rococo aesthetics, two artistic movements that were wholly invested in the decorative. At the core of the artist’s practice lies a fascination with surface, which he harnesses as a means of challenging conventional understandings of painting, sculpture, and architecture. Instead of seeing these as unrelated, Stingel actively seeks to entangle these mediums. Such efforts culminated with his 2013 exhibition at the Palazzo Grassi, Venice, for which he covered the walls and floors of the gallery with facsimiles of Ottoman carpet, evoking Carl Andre’s floor sculptures and other Minimalist strategies. Andre’s work was meant to be walked upon, and likewise, Stingel’s carpets, whether real or illusory, offer a means to probe the relationship between intervention and experience, fine art and decoration. As he himself has always insisted, “'My carpets are paintings. Not carpets” (R. Stingel, quoted in L. Yablonsky, “ART; The Carpet That Ate Grand Central”, New York Times, June 27, 2004, p. 27). In the example of Untitled, the work is both decidedly painterly and wholly physical, two descriptors that have, historically, been placed in opposition to one another. But in Stingel’s practice, they are far from contradictory or even disparate.
Although he considers himself primarily to be a painter, Stingel’s postmodern suspicions of the medium have enabled him to jettison its more burdensome associations, particularly when it comes to ideas around artistic genius. The shimmering chrome of Untitled recalls Stingel’s Silver Paintings, for which he published Instructions, a manual providing step-by-step guidance as to how to create such a work: first, spray silver enamel through layers of tulle that have been placed atop a previously primed canvas, and then, after the surface has been entirely coated and the paint has dried, remove the fabric. By virtue of both their color and their attempts to upend ideas around the ‘aura’, this cycle recalls works by Andy Warhol who, through his screenprints, toppled notions of authorship and authenticity. In permitting anyone and everyone to make a ‘Stingel’, Stingel, too, has demystified the act of artistic creation and the art object itself.
Across his multifaceted oeuvre, Stingel continues to chart new territory, bringing to the fore questions of illusion, materiality, and imagery. His interest in the pictorial surface, and particularly its ‘flatness’, ties his practice to Modernist artists, including Piero Manzoni and Frank Stella. In Untitled, Stingel used a stencil to produce the impression of ornate fabric, riffing on Minimalism’s commitment to mechanized modes of creation. “But Stingel’s ongoing interest in human interaction with architectural contexts, as well as in the affect of pure color and its reciprocal relationships with texture and scale,” argues critic Francis Richard, “proposes a playful hybrid of formal purity and visual extremes, a Modernism on drugs” (F. Richard, “Rudolf Stingel”, Artforum, vol. 35, no. 8 (April 1997), p.90). Far from simply acknowledging the contradictions, in works such as Untitled Stingel consciously looks for answers. His art, notes Roberta Smith, “asks what are paintings, who makes them, and how?” (“The Threads That Tie a Show Together”, New York Times, August 20, 2013, https://www.nytimes.com/2013⁄8/21/arts/design/rudolf-stingels-carpeting-makeover-in-venice.html).
The embellished opulence of Untitled chimes with Stingel’s long-held interest in Baroque and Rococo aesthetics, two artistic movements that were wholly invested in the decorative. At the core of the artist’s practice lies a fascination with surface, which he harnesses as a means of challenging conventional understandings of painting, sculpture, and architecture. Instead of seeing these as unrelated, Stingel actively seeks to entangle these mediums. Such efforts culminated with his 2013 exhibition at the Palazzo Grassi, Venice, for which he covered the walls and floors of the gallery with facsimiles of Ottoman carpet, evoking Carl Andre’s floor sculptures and other Minimalist strategies. Andre’s work was meant to be walked upon, and likewise, Stingel’s carpets, whether real or illusory, offer a means to probe the relationship between intervention and experience, fine art and decoration. As he himself has always insisted, “'My carpets are paintings. Not carpets” (R. Stingel, quoted in L. Yablonsky, “ART; The Carpet That Ate Grand Central”, New York Times, June 27, 2004, p. 27). In the example of Untitled, the work is both decidedly painterly and wholly physical, two descriptors that have, historically, been placed in opposition to one another. But in Stingel’s practice, they are far from contradictory or even disparate.
Although he considers himself primarily to be a painter, Stingel’s postmodern suspicions of the medium have enabled him to jettison its more burdensome associations, particularly when it comes to ideas around artistic genius. The shimmering chrome of Untitled recalls Stingel’s Silver Paintings, for which he published Instructions, a manual providing step-by-step guidance as to how to create such a work: first, spray silver enamel through layers of tulle that have been placed atop a previously primed canvas, and then, after the surface has been entirely coated and the paint has dried, remove the fabric. By virtue of both their color and their attempts to upend ideas around the ‘aura’, this cycle recalls works by Andy Warhol who, through his screenprints, toppled notions of authorship and authenticity. In permitting anyone and everyone to make a ‘Stingel’, Stingel, too, has demystified the act of artistic creation and the art object itself.
Across his multifaceted oeuvre, Stingel continues to chart new territory, bringing to the fore questions of illusion, materiality, and imagery. His interest in the pictorial surface, and particularly its ‘flatness’, ties his practice to Modernist artists, including Piero Manzoni and Frank Stella. In Untitled, Stingel used a stencil to produce the impression of ornate fabric, riffing on Minimalism’s commitment to mechanized modes of creation. “But Stingel’s ongoing interest in human interaction with architectural contexts, as well as in the affect of pure color and its reciprocal relationships with texture and scale,” argues critic Francis Richard, “proposes a playful hybrid of formal purity and visual extremes, a Modernism on drugs” (F. Richard, “Rudolf Stingel”, Artforum, vol. 35, no. 8 (April 1997), p.90). Far from simply acknowledging the contradictions, in works such as Untitled Stingel consciously looks for answers. His art, notes Roberta Smith, “asks what are paintings, who makes them, and how?” (“The Threads That Tie a Show Together”, New York Times, August 20, 2013, https://www.nytimes.com/2013⁄8/21/arts/design/rudolf-stingels-carpeting-makeover-in-venice.html).