“I wanted to be against a certain way of painting… Artists have always been accused of being decorative. I just went to the extreme.”
Rudolf Stingel's large-scale oil on canvas presents an opulent, all-over pattern reminiscent of ornate Victorian wallpaper or gilded textile design, rendered with meticulous precision and a seductive, almost overwhelming visual richness. By pushing decoration to its most excessive extreme, Stingel deliberately challenges the long-standing prejudice against ornament in fine art, forcing the viewer to confront their own assumptions about taste, beauty, and artistic legitimacy. The work transforms the canvas into a shimmering, immersive surface that exists in a provocative space between painting and pure design.
- Medium
- oil on canvas
- Location
- Phillips, Salt Lake City, UT
- Spotted At
- Auction House · PhillipsView on map
🔨 Auction Lot
Contemporary Art Evening Sale
May 16, 2013
More by Rudolf Stingel
Always one to challenge the boundaries of art, Rudolf Stingel strives to dispel the preconceptions based around art’s elevated status and actively negates any notions of hierarchy within its production. Using a broad range of mediums and techniques, Stingel explores various means of artistic expression, however, what transcends all of his pieces is an inherently reductionist approach. Peeling away areas, scratching into surfaces, carving out patches in his material, are just some of the ways the artist signals his presence. In this manner, Stingel refuses to conform to notions of the artist’s hand bringing clarity and development.
Rudolf Stingel has spent the past three decades exploring the boundaries of painting, pattern and design through his experimentation with surface and materiality. Rendered in opulent gold,
2014
Working across the various media of painting, sculpture and installation, Rudolf Stingel has always challenged the very nature of artistic practices in order to critically reveal the technical processes that lies behind them. In the present lot
Artists in conversation
Damien Hirst
British · b. 1965
Hirst similarly elevates decorative and repetitive pattern to monumental scale in works like his spot paintings, deliberately provoking debates about taste, beauty, and the boundaries of fine art with an almost overwhelming visual excess.
Takashi Murakami
Japanese · b. 1962
Murakami shares Stingel's conceptual embrace of the decorative and ornamental at large scale, pushing pattern and surface richness to an extreme while critically interrogating the divide between fine art, kitsch, and commercial aesthetics.
Philip Taaffe
American · b. 1955
Taaffe works directly in the tradition of allover ornamental patterning on large canvas, drawing from historical textile and wallpaper motifs with meticulous precision and a richly seductive visual surface that similarly challenges the fine art prejudice against decoration.
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