Rudolf Stingel is an Italian and New York artist who expands the scope and vocabulary of painting and its perception. He is best known for creating Conceptual works and installations that challenge notions about painting and its definition by using readymade and unconventional materials, such as rubber, carpet, paint and aluminum. Born in Merano, Italy in 1956, Stingel first gained recognition in the 1980s for his monochromatic silvery paintings. In the early 1990s, Stingel explored the relationship between paintings and exhibition spaces by creating site-specific installations of monochrome silvery carpets that covered the walls and floors of galleries. The carpet installations transform architecture into painting, challenging the viewer’s understanding of the traditional art object.

Rudolf Stingel’s exploration of painting continues in the late 1990s with his tulle silver paintings; a series created with Stingel’s signature technique of applying silvery enamel onto surfaces through a tulle screen, pushing the effect of painting to its limits and recontextualizing pictorial surface, depth and color. Stingel’s oeuvre also includes a series of melancholic self-portraits, and most recently golden canvases that retain traces of time and action in the studio.   

Stingel has participated in the 1999, 2003, and 2013 Biennale de Venezia, as well as the 2006 Whitney Biennial. He has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions worldwide, including a notable mid-career retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2007. Stingel’s work resides in permanent museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the de la Cruz Collection Contemporary Art Space in Miami, and the François Pinault Collection in Italy. Rudolf Stingel currently lives and works in Merano, Italy and New York.