.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Monumental in scale and majestic in effect, Rudolf Stingel’s Untitled confronts the viewer as both apparition and artifact. Derived from a vintage black-and-white photograph of the Tyrolean Alps near Merano, the northern Italian town where the artist was born in 1956, the painting is equally a portrait of a timeworn image. Stingel renders not only the steep, snow-covered range itself, but the battered photographic surface on which it appears: scratches, creases, fading tonalities, and the granular texture of an old gelatin silver print. The result is a work that oscillates between physical grandeur and the fragility of memory.
That duality is central to the painting’s effect. The motif inevitably recalls the long history of Alpine landscape in 19th-century painting, particularly the Romantic image of the mountain as a site of transcendence and overwhelming feeling, most notably articulated in the work of Caspar David Friedrich. Yet Stingel approaches that tradition obliquely. There is no figure to mediate the scene, no overt dramatization of awe, and none of the heightened painterly rhetoric that might secure the image as a straightforward revival of the sublime. Instead, Untitled maintains a studied detachment. Its emotional register lies elsewhere: in the sense that the landscape reaches us already distanced, refracted through time rather than immediate encounter.
The present work belongs to a group of monumental mountain paintings Stingel developed from similarly sourced photographs of his birthplace and its surrounding Alpine terrain. First shown in Rudolf Stingel: LIVE at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, the series translates intimate, often weathered source material into canvases of overwhelming scale, measuring up to 15 feet across. Every nuance is preserved, from the steely grays of rock and snow to the creased, discolored, and sometimes crumpled surfaces of the original prints. The paintings do not simply depict a place; they depict the way it survives in images. Landscape, here, is inseparable from mediation.
Autobiography, however, is not incidental to these paintings, even if Stingel approaches it obliquely. “All work is autobiographical,” he remarked in 2006 while embarking on his large-scale self-portraits, describing a desire to return to “a more psychological platform” and to reconnect to his origins (quoted in V. Miguel, “Review,” Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, 2006). That impulse found form in Untitled (Alpino 1976) (2006), a larger-than-life self-portrait based on his military identification card. There, as in the Alpine paintings, personal history is filtered through a preexisting photograph marked by age and use. The return to South Tyrol in Untitled is less direct, but no less charged. It is not staged as confession, nor as straightforward nostalgia, but approached through a cool remove that complicates authorship even as it draws on material close to the artist’s own history. In this sense, the mountains extend the logic of the self-portraits: autobiographical in impulse but mediated at every turn.
As Gary Carrion-Murayari observed of Stingel’s photograph-based paintings, the artist’s use of photography “removes the possibility of insight into the artist’s psyche” (“Untitled,” in F. Bonami, ed., Rudolph Stingel, exh. cat., Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 2007, p. 112). Elsewhere, he describes the labor of these works not as a direct act of self-expression but as “a sequence of framing, selection and translation” (“Rudolph Stingel: Moving Pictures,” Flash Art, November 23, 2016). Those formulations are especially insightful here. However personal the motif may be, Stingel presents it through reproduction, delegation, and physical removal. The mountain becomes less a window onto memory than an image already shaped by other hands, other technologies, and the slow attrition of time. This inevitably invites comparison with Gerhard Richter, whose photo-paintings transformed the relationship between the media decades earlier. Yet, where Richter often uses photographic distance to suspend or neutralize feeling, Stingel allows autobiography and material to re-enter the work. His mountains retain a conceptual rigor, but their affect lies in their melancholic status as wizened images of a place bound to the artist’s own history.
The mountain paintings carry forward Stingel’s longstanding challenge to singular authorship. Built from secondhand photographs, they underscore the impersonal quality only the camera can provide. Yet they preserve, in another register, the role that accident and contact have long played in Stingel’s work. Stingel reportedly left the finished canvases on the studio floor, allowing them to accumulate dust, scuffs, and other imperfections. The effect collapses the distinction between depicted wear and actual wear: the painting reproduces the deterioration of an old photograph even as it becomes newly marked. In that sense, the mountains do not abandon Stingel’s earlier interest in participation and trace so much as translate it into a quieter, more controlled form. What Untitled offers, then, is neither a straightforward landscape nor a simple return to origins. It is a work about mediation: about how places persist through images, and how those images are themselves subject to the fragility of time. In Stingel’s hands, landscape becomes a study of surface and time: less an expression of inward feeling than a measured record of how memory is carried, altered, and preserved in images.
That duality is central to the painting’s effect. The motif inevitably recalls the long history of Alpine landscape in 19th-century painting, particularly the Romantic image of the mountain as a site of transcendence and overwhelming feeling, most notably articulated in the work of Caspar David Friedrich. Yet Stingel approaches that tradition obliquely. There is no figure to mediate the scene, no overt dramatization of awe, and none of the heightened painterly rhetoric that might secure the image as a straightforward revival of the sublime. Instead, Untitled maintains a studied detachment. Its emotional register lies elsewhere: in the sense that the landscape reaches us already distanced, refracted through time rather than immediate encounter.
The present work belongs to a group of monumental mountain paintings Stingel developed from similarly sourced photographs of his birthplace and its surrounding Alpine terrain. First shown in Rudolf Stingel: LIVE at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, the series translates intimate, often weathered source material into canvases of overwhelming scale, measuring up to 15 feet across. Every nuance is preserved, from the steely grays of rock and snow to the creased, discolored, and sometimes crumpled surfaces of the original prints. The paintings do not simply depict a place; they depict the way it survives in images. Landscape, here, is inseparable from mediation.
Autobiography, however, is not incidental to these paintings, even if Stingel approaches it obliquely. “All work is autobiographical,” he remarked in 2006 while embarking on his large-scale self-portraits, describing a desire to return to “a more psychological platform” and to reconnect to his origins (quoted in V. Miguel, “Review,” Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, 2006). That impulse found form in Untitled (Alpino 1976) (2006), a larger-than-life self-portrait based on his military identification card. There, as in the Alpine paintings, personal history is filtered through a preexisting photograph marked by age and use. The return to South Tyrol in Untitled is less direct, but no less charged. It is not staged as confession, nor as straightforward nostalgia, but approached through a cool remove that complicates authorship even as it draws on material close to the artist’s own history. In this sense, the mountains extend the logic of the self-portraits: autobiographical in impulse but mediated at every turn.
As Gary Carrion-Murayari observed of Stingel’s photograph-based paintings, the artist’s use of photography “removes the possibility of insight into the artist’s psyche” (“Untitled,” in F. Bonami, ed., Rudolph Stingel, exh. cat., Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 2007, p. 112). Elsewhere, he describes the labor of these works not as a direct act of self-expression but as “a sequence of framing, selection and translation” (“Rudolph Stingel: Moving Pictures,” Flash Art, November 23, 2016). Those formulations are especially insightful here. However personal the motif may be, Stingel presents it through reproduction, delegation, and physical removal. The mountain becomes less a window onto memory than an image already shaped by other hands, other technologies, and the slow attrition of time. This inevitably invites comparison with Gerhard Richter, whose photo-paintings transformed the relationship between the media decades earlier. Yet, where Richter often uses photographic distance to suspend or neutralize feeling, Stingel allows autobiography and material to re-enter the work. His mountains retain a conceptual rigor, but their affect lies in their melancholic status as wizened images of a place bound to the artist’s own history.
The mountain paintings carry forward Stingel’s longstanding challenge to singular authorship. Built from secondhand photographs, they underscore the impersonal quality only the camera can provide. Yet they preserve, in another register, the role that accident and contact have long played in Stingel’s work. Stingel reportedly left the finished canvases on the studio floor, allowing them to accumulate dust, scuffs, and other imperfections. The effect collapses the distinction between depicted wear and actual wear: the painting reproduces the deterioration of an old photograph even as it becomes newly marked. In that sense, the mountains do not abandon Stingel’s earlier interest in participation and trace so much as translate it into a quieter, more controlled form. What Untitled offers, then, is neither a straightforward landscape nor a simple return to origins. It is a work about mediation: about how places persist through images, and how those images are themselves subject to the fragility of time. In Stingel’s hands, landscape becomes a study of surface and time: less an expression of inward feeling than a measured record of how memory is carried, altered, and preserved in images.