Rudolf Stingel

Rudolf Stingel (born 1956) is an artist based in New York City.

Stingel was born in Merano, Italy. His work engages the audience in dialogue about their perception of art and uses Conceptual painting and installations to explore the process of creation. Using readily available materials such as styrofoam, carpet, and cast polyurethane, Stingel creates art based upon an underlying conceptual framework and challenges contemporary notions about painting. The surfaces of his two-dimensional works are characteristically carved out, imprinted or indented, visibly evidencing the artist’s alteration of industrial matter. He lives in New York and Merano, Italy.

Stingel became first recognised in the late 1980s for his monochromatic works, silvery paintings with undertones of red, yellow or blue from 1987 to 1994. Stingel’s later abstract paintings from the 1990s consist of oils in pure, brilliant colors exuberantly splayed, dripped, pressed, and pulled across a black field. The works begin with the application of a thick layer of paint in a particular colour to the canvas. Pieces of gauze are then placed over the surface of the canvas and silver paint is added using a spray gun. Finally, the gauze is removed, resulting in a richly textured surface. For his works on paper Stingel is known for a technique of applying oil paint and/or enamel onto canvas or paper through a tulle screen. At the Venice Biennale in 1989, he published an illustrated “do-it-yourself” 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. In so doing, he suggests that everyone could produce a work of abstraction by following a simple set of instructions.

In the early 1990s, Stingel created a series of radiator sculptures made of translucent cast resin in which orange acrylic paint was poured during the casting process. Installed like ordinary radiators, the works nevertheless disallow their identification to a purely utilitarian object through their marbled ember-like glow.

Also in the early 1990s, Stingel started his inquiry into the relationship between painting and space by developing a series of installations that covered the walls and floors of exhibition spaces with monochrome or black and white carpets, transforming the architecture into a painting. In 1993, he exhibited a huge plush orange carpet glued to the wall at the Venice Biennale. In his site-specific Plan B (2004), he covered the entire floors of Grand Central Terminal’s Vanderbilt Hall and the Walker Art Center with an industrially-printed pink and blue floral carpet. Simultaneously in Frankfurt am Main, Stingel completely resurfaced one of the rooms of the Museum für Moderne Kunst – walls, columns and floor – with bright red and silver insulation panels printed with a traditional damask wallpaper motif. During the 2013 Venice Biennale, he covered the Palazzo Grassi with his own Persian-inspired carpeting on which he hung his abstract and Photo Realist paintings.

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