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拍品专文
Glistening black and plunging into illusory perspective, the present painting is testament to Rudolf Stingel’s ongoing interest in rendering seductive, abstract surfaces. Rising to prominence in the late 1980s with his monochromatic silver compositions, over his career the artist has radically experimented with the conceptual and material possibilities of painting. His works and installations have incorporated Styrofoam, rubber, Celotex, and, famously, carpets. Keenly interested in the conditions of his medium, Stingel challenges the juncture between fine art and ornament, and the canvas as an illusive and decorative plane. Executed in 2009 and spanning a height of almost two and a half metres, Untitled is evidence of the artist’s masterful ability to render decadent and variegated surfaces even within a monochromatic colour field. The canvas bears a unique black-on-black patterning—streaks of mottled texture run along its surface like wood grain, patterned carpet, or tiger print—and in some areas, slick oil erupts into impasto peaks and crests.
Born in Merano in the South Italian Tyrol, and spending much of his childhood in Vienna, Stingel’s introduction to art was defined by a unique hybridity of Baroque and Rococo aesthetics. Flamboyant and theatrical, these styles elided artistic disciplines, encompassing painting, sculpture and architecture. Stingel’s own practice has borne witness to unconventional and trailblazing disruptions to art and public spaces. His most iconic include an installation at Grand Central Terminal in 2004, in which he unravelled a 27,000-square-foot stretch of carpet over the floor of Vanderbilt Hall, and an exhibition at the Palazzo Grassi in 2013 in which the entire gallery interior was covered with Ottoman-style synthetic rugs. Large-scale and immersive, Untitled invites us to consider the distinction between wall and artwork, to question where one ends and the other begins. Seeking to demystify the nature of contemporary art and to erase the distinction between the art object and everyday life, Stingel’s conceptual approach draws parallels with post-war artists including Andy Warhol, Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter.
Central to Stingel’s practice, however, is a demonstrable delight in materiality that transcends his theoretical foundations. With its jet-black, velvety finish, Untitled is tantalisingly tactile. Using a gauze stencil to apply differentiated layers of black-on-black—a technique akin to printing that he had first explored in his works of the early 1990s—the artist leaves behind an intricate, raised impression in his thickly painted surface. It is a process that conjures the Surrealist automatic method of decalcomania, in which artists applied dollops of paint to transfer between two surfaces. Folded, pressed, and peeled apart, they produced chance mirror images, each bearing unique dimensionality. Untitled also makes a nod to Richter’s pioneering use of the squeegee, pulling oil paint across a canvas he created vivid slips of striated colour.
Earlier in the century, Modernist artists had endeavoured to dismantle the illusion of painting, deconstructing it to an arrangement of its fundamental parts—line, colour, shape—upon flat, two-dimensional surfaces. Indeed, Kazimir Malevich, founder of the Russian avant-garde movement Suprematism, believed he had steered non-representationalism to its radical denouement with his Black Square (1915), which featured a single black square upon a canvas. Painted almost a century later, Stingel’s Untitled reclaims black monochrome as a site of inexhaustible visual potential rather than a nihilistic endpoint. Encouraging the viewer to focus deeper on texture, quality, scale, and environment, it is reflective of the artist’s career-long investigation into our precepts surrounding painting itself.
Born in Merano in the South Italian Tyrol, and spending much of his childhood in Vienna, Stingel’s introduction to art was defined by a unique hybridity of Baroque and Rococo aesthetics. Flamboyant and theatrical, these styles elided artistic disciplines, encompassing painting, sculpture and architecture. Stingel’s own practice has borne witness to unconventional and trailblazing disruptions to art and public spaces. His most iconic include an installation at Grand Central Terminal in 2004, in which he unravelled a 27,000-square-foot stretch of carpet over the floor of Vanderbilt Hall, and an exhibition at the Palazzo Grassi in 2013 in which the entire gallery interior was covered with Ottoman-style synthetic rugs. Large-scale and immersive, Untitled invites us to consider the distinction between wall and artwork, to question where one ends and the other begins. Seeking to demystify the nature of contemporary art and to erase the distinction between the art object and everyday life, Stingel’s conceptual approach draws parallels with post-war artists including Andy Warhol, Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter.
Central to Stingel’s practice, however, is a demonstrable delight in materiality that transcends his theoretical foundations. With its jet-black, velvety finish, Untitled is tantalisingly tactile. Using a gauze stencil to apply differentiated layers of black-on-black—a technique akin to printing that he had first explored in his works of the early 1990s—the artist leaves behind an intricate, raised impression in his thickly painted surface. It is a process that conjures the Surrealist automatic method of decalcomania, in which artists applied dollops of paint to transfer between two surfaces. Folded, pressed, and peeled apart, they produced chance mirror images, each bearing unique dimensionality. Untitled also makes a nod to Richter’s pioneering use of the squeegee, pulling oil paint across a canvas he created vivid slips of striated colour.
Earlier in the century, Modernist artists had endeavoured to dismantle the illusion of painting, deconstructing it to an arrangement of its fundamental parts—line, colour, shape—upon flat, two-dimensional surfaces. Indeed, Kazimir Malevich, founder of the Russian avant-garde movement Suprematism, believed he had steered non-representationalism to its radical denouement with his Black Square (1915), which featured a single black square upon a canvas. Painted almost a century later, Stingel’s Untitled reclaims black monochrome as a site of inexhaustible visual potential rather than a nihilistic endpoint. Encouraging the viewer to focus deeper on texture, quality, scale, and environment, it is reflective of the artist’s career-long investigation into our precepts surrounding painting itself.