Contemporary Artists

Rudolf Stingel

b. 1956

Since the 1980s, Rudolf Stingel has been interrogating his chosen medium, asking what is a painting, who makes them, and how are they made, in his own paintings and conceptual projects.

Turning notions of authenticity, hierarchy, meaning, and context on their head, Stingel courts audience participation and uses unlikely materials in his work. He also produces more traditional-seeming oil-on-canvas compositions. Ranging from blurred to photorealistic, they position painting as an unreliable repository of memory, inevitably mediated by time and by the artist’s subjectivity.