Rudolf Stingel

(Italian, born 1956)

Rudolf Stingel is a contemporary Italian Conceptual artist. Employing wide-ranging materials such as rubber, carpet, painted aluminum, Styrofoam, and paint, Stingel questions and disrupts the viewer’s understanding and experience of the traditional art object. His work often reflects upon fundamental questions concerning the medium of painting, such as the role of authenticity and context in contemporary art. Born in 1956 in Merano, Italy, he first came to prominence in the late 1980s for his silver paintings mixed with various primary colors. In the early 1990s, Stingel began testing the relationship between painting and the spaces where they are shown, developing a series of installations that covered the walls and floors with monochrome carpets—thereby allowing the architecture itself to act as a painting. Stingel has participated in the 1999, 2003, and 2013 Venice Biennales, and was the subject of a mid-career retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 2007. Stingel lives and works in New York, NY.