Rudolf Stingel valuation
Published instructions for making one of his paintings, then carpeted the Palazzo Grassi.
Rudolf Stingel was born at Merano in northern Italy in 1956 and lives between New York and Merano.
What a work by Rudolf Stingel is worth
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Bio
Rudolf Stingel was born at Merano in northern Italy in 1956 and lives between New York and Merano. In 1989 he published Instructions, a manual in six languages setting out exactly how to produce one of his silver abstract paintings, on the argument that the aura of the gesture would not survive being explained. The work since has kept testing what a painting is: styrofoam panels stamped and cast, celotex insulation panels scratched and drawn on by visitors, whole rooms lined in patterned carpet or silver insulation, and, running against all of that, meticulously painted photorealist portraits and self-portraits in black and white.
The bodies of work are physically very different and the differences matter: the silver and cast panels have delicate, easily marked surfaces that cannot be cleaned; the celotex works are literally soft and dent; the oil portraits are conventional. Which series a work belongs to is the first thing to establish, along with scale, which varies enormously. Many works are untitled and identified by date and dimensions alone. Signature and date are typically on the reverse. Gagosian and Massimo De Carlo provenance is the usual reference.
Venice, the Whitney and the portraits
Stingel published Instructions at the Venice Biennale in 1989 and took part in the Biennale again in 1999 and 2003, when he lined a room of the Italian pavilion with silver insulation board for visitors to mark. His mid-career retrospective opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in 2007 and moved to the Whitney in New York, and in 2013 he covered the floors and walls of the Palazzo Grassi in Venice with patterned carpet.
The portraits began in 2005 with a painting of the dealer Paula Cooper, and the black and white self-portraits of 2006 were painted from photographs by Sam Samore. All of them are painted from photographs taken by other people, among them Robert Mapplethorpe.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
