What can painting be? Rudolf Stingel constantly
asks himself this question, and always rethinks it
anew. Born in 1956 in Merano, Italy, in 1987 he
moved to New York, where he still lives and works
today. Since the start of his career in the late
1980s, he has been exploring artistic processes –
often going beyond the traditional understanding
of painting. He probes the possibilities of painting
in the interplay of materials and textures. After
his major solo shows in 2007 at the Museum of
Contemporary Art in Chicago and the Whitney
Museum of American Art in New York, he caused
a sensation at the 2013 Venice Biennale, when
he carpeted all the walls and floors of the Palazzo
Grassi with Oriental rugs.
“I am demonstrating that using different surfaces,
we can produce very diverse environments.”
Rudolf Stingel regularly intervenes in entire gallery
and museum spaces. The present work is a
fragment of the wall-to-wall, multi-room installation,
constructed of Celotex insulation boards, which
Stingel created for his major 2019 summer show
at the Fondation Beyeler. On that occasion, he
transformed parts of the exhibition, as well as the
restaurant, into a silver-colored installation –
and also into a palimpsest, into which visitors could
literally inscribe themselves.
Celotex insulation board, wood, aluminum
115 × 115 × 4 cm
Signed on the wooden panel on the reverse
Copyright: Rudolf Stingel
Courtesy: Rudolf Stingel
Photos: Mark Niedermann
Provenance: donated by the artist
