RUDOLF STINGEL | Untitled

Sadie Coles HQ, London Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2012

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate, although the illustration fails to convey the reflective nature of the metallic paint. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Close inspection under ultra-violet light reveals a few specks of in-painting to a minor scuff towards the centre of the left vertical edge.
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Having cultivated an oeuvre characterised by its conceptual underpinnings and sumptuous aesthetic, Rudolf Stingel has furtively challenged the possibilities and functions of painting in the present. As perfectly exemplified in Untitled from 2012 – a work from the artist’s celebrated series of paintings based on the decorative patterns of carpets and wallpapers – one of Stingel’s most successful achievements has been the realisation of lavish painterly effects via an assiduously theoretical programme. If Stingel’s famous Instruction paintings questioned the authorial status of the artist, the carpet and wallpaper paintings brought into question the aesthetic function of painting itself. The baroque appearance of Stingel’s paintings as a whole, as particularly emphasised by the decorative patterns of the carpet and wallpaper works, can be read as an oxymoron when pitted against the debates surrounding painting’s legitimacy in the 1980s – a decade characterised by hard-line conceptualism and politically-minded institutional critique. Thus, where decorative painterly values were considered anathema in both function and status to the theoretical asceticism of conceptual art, Stingel’s decision to forge an unmistakably sumptuous and ornamental body of painted work arrived as a contentious riposte. Heralded by the Instruction paintings and contemporaneous with like-minded artist Christopher Wool, Stingel emerged as a significant artistic voice in the debate for paintings’ validity during the mid-1980s. Indeed, analogous to Stingel’s de-mystification of the role of artist-as-author, Wool embraced rubber stamps, stencils, and even wallpaper pattern rollers to subvert painterly conventions. However, when Stingel took up his own dialogue with the readymade patternation of wallpaper during the early 2000s, he looked to exploit its inherent decoration rather than subvert it. As he has explained: “Artists have always been accused of being decorators, so I just went to the extreme and painted the wallpaper” (Rudolf Stingel cited in: Linda Yablonksy, ‘The Carpet that Ate Grand Central’, New York Times, 27 June 2004, online).

Whilst firmly rooted in a post-modern approach to reaffirming painting’s artistic worth, Stingel’s oeuvre has always preserved an element of recalcitrance and sedition. In the same way that the artist’s first figurative paintings in 2005 were inspired by Bruce Nauman and an interest in exhibition-making rather than a turn to photo-realist painting per-se, the ornamental pattern paintings are more complex than they let on. If Stingel’s carpet installations of the early 1990s can be seen as counterparts to the Instruction paintings, the sumptuous aesthetic of his carpet and wallpaper paintings should be considered in tandem with the photo-realist paintings that he began making at the same time. Both the patterns and the photo-realist works reveal the persistence of autobiographical influences: the figurative paintings of medieval saints, the Northern Italian mountain landscapes, the self-portraits and portraits of other artists all point back to autobiographical sources, as indeed do the baroque patterns of the artist’s native Italy.

Where Nauman had turned towards his own empty studio as, in Stingel’s words, “a great way of talking about the inability of making work, of having nothing to say”, Stingel engaged with his own auto-biographical surroundings as a vehicle for painting – not necessarily as subjects, but as a channel to explore his conceptual and technical interest in the medium (Rudolf Stingel cited in: Exh. Cat., Venice, Palazzo Grassi, Rudolf Stingel, 2013, p. 17). Despite the decadence of their aesthetic appearance, Stingel’s carpet and wallpaper paintings possess the same conceptual bite as his early work; moreover, they continue a lineage that started with his first carpet installation in an exhibition curated by Colin de Land in 1991, and collaborative exhibitions with artists such as Felix-Gonzalez Torres and Franz West.

Simultaneously rooted in the late 1980s New York art scene and the orientalism of the Venetian Baroque, the present work is a hallmark of Stingel’s conceptual and aesthetic virtuosity. The lavish motifs that were once fashionable as interior decoration in opulent Venetian palazzos provide a visual spectacle that draws the viewer in and yet confronts them with a startlingly unyielding interrogation of the aesthetic function of art. As Roberta Smith concludes, “For nearly twenty years Rudolf Stingel has made work that seduces the eye whilst also upending most notions of what, exactly, constitutes a painting, how it should be made and by whom” (Roberta Smith, 'Making Their Mark', The New York Times, 13 October 2007, online).