2000-2003

In the last quarter century, Italian-born Rudolf Stingel has emerged as one of the most radical artists of his time. Upon relocating to New York in 1987, he came to prominence during a decade when painting was famously declared dead. Despite the prevailing narrative of the time, Stingel never abandoned painting and instead dedicated his practice to probing the fundamental questions, possibilities, and limitations of the medium time and again, while simultaneously redefining the position of the viewer before a painting's surface. His Styrofoam and Celotex series, which are the outcome of several major installations at the François Pinault Foundation, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the 2003 Venice Biennale, are arguably two of the artist's most significant and daring bodies of work within his extraordinarily rich oeuvre. This publication presents a selection works rarely seen together, exploring the grittier underbelly of Stingel's multi-faceted artistic output.