Rudolf Stingel

Paula Cooper Gallery, New York

Acquired from the above by the present owner 

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is deeper and richer original and it fails to convey the texture of the work. Condition: Please refer to the department for a professional condition report.
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Created in an utterly immersive scale and rendered in a seductive dark palette, Untitled is an imposing example of Rudolf Stingel’s acclaimed wallpaper works; a series that was first exhibited at the artist’s earliest solo show at Sadie Coles HQ, London. For this debut exhibition Stingel created six highly decorative gold paintings, half with an ornate floral baroque motif – similar to the present work – the other half replicating the star pattern of an Italian wallpaper from the 1950s. Melding both superfluous ornamentation and frivolity with a strict sense of geometrically guided repetition built through industrialised processes, Stingel’s nuanced references to the decorative styles of the Italian Baroque and French Rococo deftly contribute to his overarching concerns regarding the fusion of pictorial and architectural space. With the muted density of opaque velvet and beguiling opulence of its intricate detailing Untitled is an extremely rare, black on black example of the artist’s profound expansion of the definition of painting.

Upon entering the New York art world in 1987, Stingel was confronted by a dichotomy of dual aesthetic trends. Eschewing reactionary minimalist and neo-expressionist tendencies, the young artist pioneered a process-focused approach to painting through the creation of his lustred silver monochromes. In 1989 he released his seminal Instructions: a limited edition art book that outlined the complex process by which his iconic enamel works could be replicated. By codifying his technique with a democratic release into the public sphere, Stingel’s critique demystified studio process and subverted notions of authorial genius in favour of a sense of industrial manufacture and mechanised labour akin to Warhol’s Factory.

Created by applying paint through a fine and detailed stencil, Untitled extends Stingel’s pioneering industrialised processes by providing an imprint or trace of a predetermined referent. Addressing the inherent nature of painting, it makes permanent a past presence now removed. Stingel conceptually outsources authorship to a visual mode that evokes the opulence of Rococo and Baroque designs which were once harnessed to create luxurious damask wallpapers with cut-velvet floral forms. The grandeur of damask became more cheaply imitated through the emergence of Flock (powdered wool) wallpaper from the mid-Eighteenth Century. With the industrial revolution and the development of sophisticated production technologies, the increased ubiquity of such papers led to a gradual degradation of their grandiosity, eventually transitioning to kitsch associations in the Twentieth Century. The relentless replication of forms exploits a sense of artifice to an enigmatic degree. Converse to modernist tendencies for simplicity and the cold minimalism of industrial aesthetics, Stingel engages with the history of decorative opulence, presenting stylised wallpaper as a freestanding abstract painting.

Stingel grew up in Tyrol and Vienna; areas in which the Rococo styles from Northern Europe blended with the Mediterranean Baroque to form a unique aesthetic language.  Here, in the Seventeenth Century, traditional Tyrolian wood carving was melded with Italian stucco to create a sophisticated and theatrically hybrid style of interior decoration. Crucially for Stingel, the Bavarian Rococo’s dramatic fusion produced a synthesis of architectural and pictorial space. In dialogue with Stingel’s famed carpet paintings and mirrored floor installations, the designs of Untitled evoke decadent interior schemata in which wallpapers and rugs remain unilaterally bedecked. It evidences a crucial reconfiguring of space which disturbs what has been described by Rosalind Krauss as “the myths of human erectness as ‘pure visuality’” (Rosalind Krauss and Yves-Alain Bois, Formless: A User’s Guide, New York 1997, p. 32).