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Rudolf Stingel’s work is a continual reflection on fundamental questions about painting. It explores not only colour, space and light, but also materialities, which sometimes lead to the use of unusual materials such as carpet, painted aluminium or polystyrene. “Painting and sculpture enter into a union with one another in an interplay of design and creative chance... Humour, irony and a clear commitment to minimalism form the core of his work. He combines his love of painting with postmodern doubt concerning art, and often achieves a near-perfect balance between visualisation and concept." (http://www.georgkargl.com/de/kuenstler/rudolf-stingel, accessed 21.10.2018)

Born in South Tyrol, the self-taught artist has lived and worked in New York since 1987, after first spending time in Vienna and Milan: “I wanted to try it. I couldn’t speak any English, but I immediately realised: That’s where I want to go,” the artist recalls (https://www.tageszeitung.it/2017/06/25/der-millionen-kuenstler/, accessed 21.10.2018). Comparable works, likewise created in 1997, which ostensibly appear to be rooted in the Informel art movement, were on display in the same year at the renowned Paula Cooper Gallery in New York and, as is typical of Rudolf Stingel, he had the gallery’s White Cube fitted with a red and pink striped carpet, simultaneously creating a living room atmosphere and a colour contrast to rival the paintings on the wall. Rudolf Stingel “likes to mess about with painting” (http://www.art-in-berlin.de/incbmeld.php?id=1819 accessed 21.10.2018), and challenges every traditional definition of what a painting is, radically expanding the concept of the art of painting.

Moreover, on closer inspection of the surface, it becomes clear that these informal pictures have by no means been painted spontaneously and impulsively. One can see how complex and complicated, how technically refined, the application of the paint is. The red paint rises from the black base colour like craters and hill ranges in a lunar landscape. Once again, the artist “visualises” his “basic conviction about the nature of painting and the developmental potential of this problematic medium: in order to open up new perspectives for it, it should not just focus on purely visual qualities, on the expressionist gesture, picturesque beauty or composition”(see above). Rudolf Stingel thus takes the viewer, uncoupled from the physical presentation venue, on a journey into the “atmospheric imaginary, into mood spaces” (http://kunsthallezurich.ch/sites/default/files/downloads/pressetext_rudolfstingel.pdf, accessed 21.10.2018) that are difficult for the viewer to elude.

(Sophie Cieslar)