13 October – 24 November 2007
For the inaugural show of the new gallery of Sadie Coles HQ, at 69 South Audley Street, renowned Italian artist Rudolf Stingel continues his exploration of the viewer’s physical encounter with the artwork. Upsetting notions of authenticity and context, an imposing single three-panel painting re-imagines a famous modern masterpiece: Francis Bacon’s Study for Self-Portrait, 1985. Double the size of Bacon’s original the work immerses the viewer.
Stingel’s inspiration for the work was the re-imagining of the moment in which someone sees a work of art for the first time, as an image in a library book, black and white, sitting somewhere in the middle of America. Indeed, with jagged brushstrokes the work appears almost pixilated, or made of large Benday dots. The work also displays a sophisticated understanding of Bacon’s painterly strategies. For example the way in which the two outer panels are evacuated of figures references Bacon’s characteristic simplification of space used in order to enable a greater sense of movement.
Currently the subject of a major survey show at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, (until 14 October 2007), Stingel is celebrated for his rigorous and critical approach to painting. Immersed in minimalist, conceptual, and performative histories, Stingel’s use of a wide-range of everyday, unconventional materials such as carpet, rubber and Styrofoam, consistently challenges the purity of the medium. Of the exhibition at the Whitney Roberta Smith has written in the New York Times: "For nearly 20 years [Rudolf Stingel] has made work that seduces the eye while also upending most notions of what, exactly, constitutes a painting, how it should be made and by whom." Beginning and ending with one of Stingel’s installations of aluminum-coated panels into which previous viewers had been invited to carve, the Whitney’s show clearly traces his shift from early abstract monochromatic works (from 1987), to more recent oversized, melancholic self-portraits that deal with figuration and the translation of photography (from 2006). In its variety and ambition Stingel’s practice insists on a constant and radical evaluation of both painting’s limits and possibilities in which the viewer is complicit throughout.
Rudolf Stingel was born in 1956 in Merano, Italy. He lives and works in New York and Bolzano, Italy and previously exhibited a series of gold wallpaper paintings at Sadie Coles HQ in 2004.
Rudolf Stingel’s first exhibition at Sadie Coles HQ is a series of new gold wallpaper paintings. A composition of repeated units, the mechanically reproduced paintings initially appear to be identical elements forming a homogenous whole. On closer inspection idiosyncrasies come to light, signs of corruption in the production process, signs of human input, that render them unique parts of a unique whole and the end, or rather a stage, in an organic process.
At the 2003 Venice Biennale Rudolf Stingel created a silver room. Within the Italian pavilion, curated by Francesco Bonami, under the title Sogni e Conflitti: La dittatura dello spettatore / Dreams and Conflicts: The dictatorship of the spectator, Stingel’s installation captured the curatorial thread and brought it to life. The hoards of visitors making their art pilgrimage scratched their names, jokes, comments, images into the silver, like children on a school trip leaving their graffitied legacy on the walls of public toilets. As free space ran out people stuck on papers, photographs and objects, like votive offerings at a saint’s shrine. An art shrine; visually, aesthetically, but at root the very antithesis; standing against the sacrosanct status of the work and demystifying the figure of the artist as damage was reconfigured as creation and the work became the ultimate collaborative project.
A path to the room in Venice can be traced back from 1989, when Stingel published a manual in English, Italian, German, French, Spanish and Japanese, 'Instructions, Istruzioni, Anleitung...', outlining the equipment and procedure that would enable anyone to create one of his paintings: an altruistic gesture, with which to counteract a culture of veneration. This democratic intent has been matched by Stingel’s choice of materials; wallpaper, Styrofoam, carpets - ordinary, ubiquitous tools that nod towards the legacy of arte povera. In the selection of silver and gold asceticism is overruled by decadence, but these works stand alongside the others as attempts to disrupt the modernist monochrome. Working with strident orange or a jarring blue and pink floral patterned carpet Stingel launches an assault on the paradoxical idea of a neutral aesthetics. Decoration is allowed back, texture takes its place alongside the visual in this heightened sensory environment. Stingel disrupts our perception of the spaces we inhabit and our perception of the spaces of exhibition, as he destabilizes the accepted hierarchy between the work and the context.
Born in Italy, Rudolf Stingel lives and works in New York. He has exhibited widely throughout Europe and the United States, in both solo and group shows, including an installation with Felix Gonzalez Torres in the Neue Galerie Graz in Austria in 1994 and a mid-career retrospective at the Museo d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Trento, Italy in 2001. His work was included in the Venice Biennale in both 1993 and 2003 and in 2004 he collaborated with the Public Art Fund to create the site specific Plan B for the Grand Central Station, New York and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.