Rudolf Stingel, Untitled 1993. Tate. © Rudolf Stingel.
9 rooms in Materials and Objects
This carpeted wall is an ever-changing painting that visitors can shape with their hands
Untitled 1993 consists of a wall entirely covered with orange carpet. Viewers are invited to touch the surface, leaving temporary marks.
In the 1980s, Stingel began creating large paintings from everyday materials like aluminium and polystyrene foam instead of traditional paint on canvas. The colour and texture of these materials became the surfaces of his pictures. He went on to make paintings out of carpet, playing with our perception of this domestic furnishing.
Stingel remarked: ‘I was more interested in the monochromatic experience of an orange carpet... I was not looking for the traces that people would leave on the carpet.’ However, ‘when the carpet went on the wall... people all started writing on it, and I welcomed it’.
The result is a work of art fabricated by commercial manufacturers, installed according to the artist’s instructions and completed by its audience. This challenges traditional ideas about artistic authorship.
Rudolf Stingel, Untitled 1993
Untitled was first exhibited at the 45th Venice Biennale in 1993 as a part of Aperto '93, a section of the Biennale devoted to new tendencies in art and emerging artists. It consists of a wall 5.2 x 9 m in area, entirely covered with orange Savannah custom colour carpeting. Viewers are invited to mould and sculpt the 1.5 cm thick pile of the carpet, facilitating an experience of the work that is both tactile and visual. One in a series of carpet-based works made by Stingel in the early 1990s, Untitled challenges the limits of the materials traditionally used to create a painting. Stingel’s practice engages in a formal and conceptual analysis of the medium of painting. By employing such unlikely materials as carpeting, Styrofoam, and aluminium-coated panelling, he presents three-dimensionality as symbolic of painting itself. The interactive quality of the carpet works is integral to the artist’s conception of a painting, as he explains in his statement that, ‘[he allows] painting, but not by [his] assistants who carry out [his] concept but by a public that inscribes its own individual response in a material way into the work’ (quoted in Rainer Zittl, ‘The Trickster’, in Bonami, p.35).
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artworks in Rudolf Stingel
Art in this room
Rudolf Stingel
Untitled
1993