1995

Oil on paper

29 15/16 x 21 15/16  (55.8 x 76 cm)

Ex-collection:
The Artist
Massimo di Carlo , Milan
Private Collection
Gagosian Gallery, New York
Private collection until the present

Over the course of more than two decades Rudolf Stingel has brought to the fore an approach to painting that is as much about seeing as it is about making. Moving freely between abstraction and representation, in both intimate and monumental scales, Stingel has seduced viewers with his ornate surfaces and simultaneously undermined expectations of what painting can and should be. His work has been straddling the poles of conceptual deadpan-ness and aesthetic gratification for more than two decades. Although he considers himself a painter, his work often takes the form of all-over interventions in architectural space, broadening and destabilizing the definition of traditional painting. Stingel’s technique of applying oil paint and/or enamel onto paper through a tulle screen and variations of this technique to create monochrome or patterned paintings since the late 1980s. In 1989, he published Instructions, an illustrated “do-it-yourself” guide with step-by-step guidelines to create his abstract paintings. In so doing, and in suggesting that everyone could produce a work of abstraction by following a simple set of instructions, Stingel was debunking the transcendental and metaphysical loftiness sometimes associated with abstract art.

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