Rudolf Stingel

Born 1956 Merano, Italy.
Lives and works in Bolzano, Italy, and New York (NY), United States.

«The sheer beauty of Rudolf Stingel's paintings often distracts giddy viewers from the banality of the ready-made materials from which they are made. Whether abstract or photorealistic canvases, a carpet laid on floor or hung on a wall or a room lined with silver insulation material, Stingel describes each work he makes as a painting. Playing with the essential ingredients of the medium - a culinary approach adopted in Instructions (1989) a step-by-step guide to making a "real Rudolf Stingel" painting - Stingel ruptures painting's autonomy, dislocating and unfolding its surfaces into architectural space with a knowing decorative appeal that collides spectacle and reality. A recurrent gesture sees Stingel lining entire rooms with reflective insulation panelling, creating an open invitation for viewers to leave marks or attach objects to its surfaces. Like the marks that accumulate on the carpets he install on gallery floors or walls, or the surfaces of his Styrofoam pieces eaten away by footprints, Stiengel's works record the presence of both artist and viewer and are at once activated and destroyed through the processes of viewing and making. His series of large-format photorealist self portraits based on photographs taken by his friend Sam Samore, or his recent Untitled (2007), a distorted remake of Francis Bacon's triptych Study for Self-Portrait (1985) copied from a black-and-white photographic reproduction, might at first suggest a return to more traditional values of image-making, yet they inevitably return our focus to their expertly rendered surfaces which mark that unstable threshold between the real and its manufactured image.» Andrew Bonacina