Rudolph Stingel, Untitled, detail, 1994, Cast urethane rubber, 47 x 54.6 x 22.8 cm, Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

Rudolf Stingel, Untitled (After Sam), 2005-2006, Oil on canvas , 132 x 180", Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

Rudolf Stingel, Untitled, 1991, Carpet.

Rudolf Stingel, Untitled, 1993, Oil and enamel on canvas, 99 ¼ x 66 1/16 inches (252.1 x 167.7 cm), Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

Whitney Museum
of American Art
945 Madison Avenue
at 75th Street
New York, NY 10021
800-944-8639
Rudolf Stingel
June 28-October 14, 2007

Employing a wide-ranging palette of unconventional materials that includes carpet, rubber, painted aluminum, and Styrofoam, Stingel reflects upon some of the fundamental questions facing painting today: authenticity, meaning, hierarchy, and context. By transforming the process and perception of paintings, Stingel's work alters the viewer's physical encounter with the artwork, and invites participation in a new and deeper understanding and appreciation of art. When Stingel carpeted New York's Grand Central Station in 2004, and later covered a lobby floor with a vivid orange rug in Universal Experience: Art, Life, and the Tourist's Eye at the MCA in 2005, he transformed the spaces into works of art that visitors needed to occupy to experience. Stingel remarked, "This had all the intellectual qualities that I ask from a painting. It's aggressive, it's against the system, it's against the usual way of doing a painting. Once in a while, it's good to freshen up the air with these kinds of things."

Organized by Francesco Bonami, Manilow Senior Curator at Large for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (MCA), this 20-year survey, covering Stingel's work from 1987 to 2007, takes a comprehensive look at an influential contemporary artist whose work seeks to demystify notions of the artist, the artistic process, and the art object. The New York installation is being overseen by the Whitney’s Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Curator Chrissie Iles.

Curator Francesco Bonami notes, "Stingel consistently aims to redefine what painting can be, what it has been, and what it is." Bonami has followed Stingel's progress over the decades and has included his work in four previous exhibitions at the MCA: Examining Pictures: Exhibiting Paintings (1999), Age of Influence: Reflections in the Mirror of American Culture (2000), Universal Experience: Art, Life, and the Tourist's Eye (2005), and Figures in the Field: Figurative Sculpture and Abstract Painting from Chicago Collections (2006).

Stingel's full range of work, including his recent portraits and self portraits, are represented in this career survey, along with new site-specific installations created for each venue. At the MCA, the central atrium has an enormous, ornate chandelier centerpiece with an eight-foot diameter with glass and Czech crystal created by New Metal Crafts, Chicago. Stingel has covered all of the front atrium lobby walls with silver panels that visitors can write on or cut into, altering the work over the course of the exhibition. When Stingel originally showed his silver paintings he found that visitors repeatedly scrawled on them, so he pushed the idea further, challenging visitors to question their ideas about surfaces that invite graffiti. Stingel takes the language of public rest rooms, bus stops, and underpasses and puts them into a museum setting, undermining the space and people's perception of painting.

Playing with notions of art and decoration, Stingel often places on the wall what is typically found on the floor, and vice versa. Similar to the way that he may install a carpet on the wall of an exhibition space, Stingel hangs large-scale panels of Styrofoam, some with surfaces that depict deep footprints. To make these Styrofoam works, Stingel steps in acid and then walks across and marks the surface. Both the carpets and the Styrofoam works document the physical interaction between the work and human contact, either by the artist or visitors.

Stingel has produced various bodies of work over the past twenty years that highlight his highly original process of creating art, but the unifying theme of the exhibition is the artist's connection with painting. Although he has worked and lived in New York City since 1987 when he left Italy, Stingel continues a European relation to the history of painting that he both parodies and glorifies in the process of his dissection.

For the most recent body of work in the exhibition, Stingel has been focusing on enormous photorealistic portraits and self-portraits. Included in the 2006 Whitney Biennial, Stingel's self portraits show a dark, melancholic side of the state of mind of the Western artist. These self-referential paintings manage to both question and celebrate the artistic process at once, with a humor and beauty that can also be subversive.

Rudolph Stingel, Untitled (Birthday), detail, 2006, Oil on canvas, 38.1 x 52.1 cm, Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.