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Lot Essay
Though his highly conceptual oeuvre can be broken into discrete categories, Rudolf Stingel’s driving purpose has always been a need to interrogate and reconfigure the creative process. Untitled (Bolego) is an intimate example of the artist’s inquiry into the self as well as the nature of visual representation. Painted the same year as his mid-career retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, it is a part of a series of self-portraits he undertook on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday. Though representational, the canvas is connected tangentially to his earlier monochrome works and the interactive installations for which he has become known. All of these projects hinge upon an investigation of the space between artist and artwork, audience and authorship. Curator Francesco Bonami posits, “To look at these self-portraits as a departure from Stingel’s earlier work is a mistake. This new work is one of the many parallel paths of his continuation of the autobiography of painting. The early silver paintings and the recent self-portraits are the two poles of the bi-polar nature of the artist and the bi-polar nature of painting, torn between the suffocating boundaries of the mundane and the limitless sublime.” (F. Bonami, Rudolf Stingel, exh. cat., Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art and travelling, 2007, p. 20). The self-portraits are just one step further into Stingel’s journey to understand and upend the limits of painting itself.
Untitled (Bolego) is a crisp, highly detailed rendering of a man in repose. The fact that this is a portrait of the artist is not immediately apparent since there are none of the traditional signifiers like palettes, brushes, and other traditional tools of the trade that have been used throughout art history. Lying on a bed or couch with his head propped against a white wall, the subject’s dark face contrasts with the white of his button-down shirt and the striped pillow behind him. Foreshortened so that the bottom edge of the work starts at around his rib cage, the composition pushes upward toward the face where a single light source reflects in his eye under bushy brows and tousled hair. The close crop of the work, the aspect ratio and size of the piece, and the non-traditional framing of the subject all serve to further enhance awareness of the painting’s photographic source material.
As an artist, Stingel is decidedly Post-Modern in his sensibilities. Though materiality is at the forefront of much of his oeuvre, a single process or medium does not define his practice. It is instead the very thread of questioning the nature of artistic expression and the creative impulse that weaves through all of Stingel’s works. In his self-portraits, the examinations are myriad and overlapping. The divide between painting and photography, as well as the history of their intermingling, is on full display. Furthermore, an investigation of source materials, archives, and authorship is apparent when we learn that Stingel painted this after a photograph he did not take. The present example comes from a collaboration with the artist’s friend, Roland Bolego. Identified by name in the subtitle, the photographer worked to produce a set of carefully constructed vignettes on film that Stingel then used as the basis for his paintings. Like the early work of Gerhard Richter, paintings such as Untitled (Bolego) are made with an awareness of the divide between media. They are not illusionistic images in that they show the real world but are instead reproductions of reproductions with a foothold in our realm.
Stingel’s deliberate journey began in 2005 when he painted a portrait of his gallerist, Paula Cooper, from a source image by Robert Mapplethorpe that he found in the gallery’s archive. The resulting canvas, appropriately titled Paula (2005), was less of a painted portrait than a commentary on the act and process of painting. Stingel installed it in the white-walled gallery, noting, “It’s not about physically being able to make a painting, it’s about wanting to do it and what’s in the painting. The challenge was to do a show with a painting that wasn’t a painting show. By painting the floor white I shifted the attention to the space and its history: a temple of Minimalism and its high priestess.” (R. Stingel, quoted in C. Sophie Rabinowitz, “1000 Words: Rudolf Stingel,” Artforum, May 2005, Vol. 43, No. 9, p. 221). By using a photographic source created by another person, the artist vacated the final product of any creative agency or expressive nuance. Instead, the work became a conversation about the manufacture of paintings, the deluge of images in society, and the mystique still attributed to the art form. Untitled (Bolego) continues this same tact but muddies the waters by using the very painter himself as the subject while still allowing for a perplexing disconnect from claims of authorship.
Untitled (Bolego) is a crisp, highly detailed rendering of a man in repose. The fact that this is a portrait of the artist is not immediately apparent since there are none of the traditional signifiers like palettes, brushes, and other traditional tools of the trade that have been used throughout art history. Lying on a bed or couch with his head propped against a white wall, the subject’s dark face contrasts with the white of his button-down shirt and the striped pillow behind him. Foreshortened so that the bottom edge of the work starts at around his rib cage, the composition pushes upward toward the face where a single light source reflects in his eye under bushy brows and tousled hair. The close crop of the work, the aspect ratio and size of the piece, and the non-traditional framing of the subject all serve to further enhance awareness of the painting’s photographic source material.
As an artist, Stingel is decidedly Post-Modern in his sensibilities. Though materiality is at the forefront of much of his oeuvre, a single process or medium does not define his practice. It is instead the very thread of questioning the nature of artistic expression and the creative impulse that weaves through all of Stingel’s works. In his self-portraits, the examinations are myriad and overlapping. The divide between painting and photography, as well as the history of their intermingling, is on full display. Furthermore, an investigation of source materials, archives, and authorship is apparent when we learn that Stingel painted this after a photograph he did not take. The present example comes from a collaboration with the artist’s friend, Roland Bolego. Identified by name in the subtitle, the photographer worked to produce a set of carefully constructed vignettes on film that Stingel then used as the basis for his paintings. Like the early work of Gerhard Richter, paintings such as Untitled (Bolego) are made with an awareness of the divide between media. They are not illusionistic images in that they show the real world but are instead reproductions of reproductions with a foothold in our realm.
Stingel’s deliberate journey began in 2005 when he painted a portrait of his gallerist, Paula Cooper, from a source image by Robert Mapplethorpe that he found in the gallery’s archive. The resulting canvas, appropriately titled Paula (2005), was less of a painted portrait than a commentary on the act and process of painting. Stingel installed it in the white-walled gallery, noting, “It’s not about physically being able to make a painting, it’s about wanting to do it and what’s in the painting. The challenge was to do a show with a painting that wasn’t a painting show. By painting the floor white I shifted the attention to the space and its history: a temple of Minimalism and its high priestess.” (R. Stingel, quoted in C. Sophie Rabinowitz, “1000 Words: Rudolf Stingel,” Artforum, May 2005, Vol. 43, No. 9, p. 221). By using a photographic source created by another person, the artist vacated the final product of any creative agency or expressive nuance. Instead, the work became a conversation about the manufacture of paintings, the deluge of images in society, and the mystique still attributed to the art form. Untitled (Bolego) continues this same tact but muddies the waters by using the very painter himself as the subject while still allowing for a perplexing disconnect from claims of authorship.