Untitled

In his forty-year career, Rudolf Stingel never ceased experimenting with painting as a medium and subject, consciously using it as a metaphor to probe our perceptions of the image as well as the conventional limits of what makes something a work of art.  In his combination of materials, painting techniques, and genres of representation (from hyper-realism to abstraction, portraiture, and beyond), the artist developed his work through a conceptual approach to the medium.

Untitled, 2010, a monumental, gilded canvas, represents a new way of approaching monochrome in contemporary art, one that explores the mysteries of the image’s creation and appearance. The painting’s surface, which preserves the traces of a variety of gestures, fluctuates between a sensation of airy lightness and the thickness of the material. The image’s fragility, which at times recalls a decorative vocation, is matched by the preciousness of the gold, which plays with the light. This same gold, the source of sacred apparitions, represented the immeasurable space of the divine in Byzantine icons.

The Pinault Collection showed this work for the first at the Icones exhibition at Punta della Dogana in Venice in 2023