The National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art is the winner of the 2024 edition of PAC – Plan for Contemporary Art, with Untitled (2012) by Rudolf Stingel, which has been acquired for the permanent collection through a project promoted by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture.
Untitled is the first work by Stingel to enter the museum’s collection. The silver-toned painting appears on the canvas as a photographic trace depicting a carpet pattern—an element central to the artist’s practice, symbolically evoking the passage of time through the constant movement of people.
“Since his emergence in the 1980s, Rudolf Stingel has been consistently interested in fundamental questions concerning the material conditions of painting and space. Stingel’s hand overturns the traditional properties of painting—flatness, verticality, autonomy—recalibrating the relationship between pictorial space and material surface. His approach to the surface has always been paradoxical. While asserting the painting’s impassive materiality, the artist is also deeply interested in its tactile and seductive qualities.
In Untitled, Stingel continues to question the logic of horizontal and vertical planes by painting the photographic image of a Turkish Sivas carpet onto a canvas whose orientation is unequivocally vertical. The carpet appears as a spectral photographic trace; its original materiality is reaffirmed as an ornamental pictorial presence through the rich, delicately layered surface. Like the decorative language of Bavarian Rococo that shaped Stingel’s formative years in South Tyrol, the carpet pattern asserts itself as a pictorial subject, infusing the traces of the photographic imprint with a palpable sense of its former material presence and meaning.”
(Excerpt from a text by Dr. Chrissie Iles, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Curator, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York)
Rudolf Stingel (Merano, 1956)
He attended art school in Val Gardena and, after brief periods in Vienna and Milan, decided in 1987 to settle in the United States, while maintaining strong ties with his origins and dividing his time between his studios in Merano and New York.
In 1989, he published Instructions, a six-language instruction manual explaining how to accurately create his abstract works. His artistic research focuses on the relationship between abstraction and figuration, addressing profound existential themes, memory, time and vanitas.
In 1991, he began creating his “carpet” series, pictorial installations that also completely cover entire environments, offering viewers an immersive experience and inviting them into a visual and tactile relationship with the work of art.
His prolific and diverse output includes a number of portraits and self-portraits, ranging from very small to monumental in scale, produced using photorealist techniques.
He participated in the Venice Biennale in 1993 and 2003, as well as in major group exhibitions, including those held at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, in 1999; the Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 2004; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, in 2012.
Among his solo exhibitions are those at MART in 2001; the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, in 2004; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and the Whitney Museum, New York, in 2007; the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, in 2010; the Wiener Secession, Vienna, in 2012; Palazzo Grassi, Venice, in 2013; and the Fondation Beyeler, Riehen, in 2019.
His works are held in prestigious institutions and collections, including MAXXI, Rome; Museion, Bolzano; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; the Whitney Museum, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Centre Pompidou and the François Pinault Collection, Paris; Tate Modern, London; Fondation Beyeler, Riehen; and Moderna Museet, Stockholm.
In 2018, he received the President of the Republic Award for Painting.