Rudolf Stingel: Though Rudolph Stingel’s work isn’t presented on traditional canvases he is a painter in the purest sense. Through his instructional photographs and installations, his work explores the essence of making, gesture, and expression through questioning authenticity and authorship. Often inviting the audience to interact with his work, Stingel promulgates the artistic process, allowing his artworks to develop as public ‘collaborations’.
Rudolf Stingel's Conceptual paintings and site-specific installations deconstruct, in order to popularize, the processes of making art. In 1989, he produced an instruction manual on how to make abstract paintings and duly painted according to its formula for a decade. In another take on the notion of do-it-yourself artwork, Stingel often covers the gallery walls with reflective insulation boards. The first time he showed these silver "paintings," viewers scrawled all over them; but rather than seeing this as a defacement of his work, the artist responded by upping the ante. His wall coverings have since become increasingly baroque in terms of their decorative elements, thereby challenging viewers to reconsider their preconceived ideas about what constitutes a legitimate surface for graffiti.
Through reconsidering the appreciation of aesthetics as a relational experience, Stingel challenges ideas of cultural hierarchy, modes of production, and the mythology of the artist.
