Here we are, with another focus on the "must see" at this Basel Art Week 2019. In the last articles we traced together the main features of this Art Basel Fair, spoke with the VOLTA director Amanda Coulson, and even led you inside this edition of paper position basel; now its time to snoop on the Rudolf Stingel solo show at Fondation Beyeler.
The exhibition is the first major presentation of Rudolf Stingel’s paintings in Europe following his show at Palazzo Grassi in Venice (2013) and the first in Switzerland since the one staged by the Kunsthalle Zurich (1995). If you want to visit Switzerland during the Basel Art Week, don't miss our list of the most important contemporary art spaces --> When private businesses meet Contemporary Art...
Curated by Udo Kittelmann, this solo show will present Rudolf Stingel’s major series of works of the past 20 years, providing a comprehensive overview of his versatile artistic practice. Indeed, the exhibition doesn't follow a chronological order, focussing instead on the specific confrontation of individual works. Thought on the Renzo Piano’s spatial design of Fondation Beyeler, the show will also present new site-specific works using carpets and Celotex insulation boards, and new paintings created only this year and on view for the very first time. There is a long list of Renzo Piano's Foundations and Museums, as well as the numerous artists that love create a dialogue with his spaces. Read more about the latest exhibition of Martin Creed, titled "AMIGOS" at the Centro Botìn in Santander.
Born in 1956 in Merano (Italy) and moved to New York in 1987, where he has mainly been living and working since, Rudolf Stingel has approached painting in a conceptual and self-reflexive manner, exploring its possibilities and media-specific limits through the interplay of artistic strategies, materials and shapes.
Next to series of abstract and photorealistic paintings on canvas, from his very beginnings in the late 1980s, he creates large-scale works made of styrofoam or cast metal in which traces and imprints are preserved for eternity. He also designs site-specific installations in which he covers walls with monochrome deep-pile carpets, which visitors can smooth down or roughen up with their hands, like so many large brush strokes. In other works, he lines entire rooms with reflective silver Celotex insulation boards, whose soft texture invites viewers to inscribe messages, initials or other signs. Notwithstanding their material disparities, all these works share the random or deliberate painterly traces that appear on their surface. They also pose fundamental questions regarding the understanding and the perception of art as well as memory and the transience of things.
Rudolf Stingel solo show at Fondation Beyeler its open from 26 May until 6 October 2019.