CHICAGO, IL.- The Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Chicago, opens the new year with Rudolf Stingel, the first major museum exhibition in the United States of renowned international artist Rudolf Stingel, on view from January 27 to May 27, 2007. This twenty year retrospective takes a comprehensive look at this influential contemporary artist whose work seeks to demystify the artist, the artistic process, and the art object. Celebrated for his explorations of the process of painting and the “idea” of art, Stingel combines minimalist, conceptual, and performative practices to create unexpected spaces.

Employing a wideranging palette of unconventional materials that includes carpet, rubber, painted aluminum, and Styrofoam, Stingel reflects upon fundamental questions facing painting today: authenticity, meaning, hierarchy, and context. By transforming the process and perception of paintings, Stingel's work alters the viewer's physical encounter with the artwork, and invites participation in a new and deeper understanding and appreciation of art. When Stingel carpeted New York's Grand Central Station in 2004, and later covered a lobby floor with a vivid orange rug in Universal Experience: Art, Life, and the Tourist's Eye at the MCA in 2005, he transformed the spaces into works of art that visitors needed to occupy to experience. Stingel remarked, "This had all the intellectual qualities that I ask from a painting. It's aggressive, it's against the system, it's against the usual way of doing a painting. Once in a while, it's good to freshen up the air with these kind of things."

This retrospective, covering Stingel's work from 1987 to 2007, is curated by Francesco Bonami, MCA Manilow Senior Curator at Large, who says, "Stingel consistently aims to redefine what painting can be, what it has been, and what it is." Bonami has consistently followed Stingel's progress over the decades, including his work in four previous exhibitions that he curated at the MCA: Examining Pictures: Exhibiting Paintings (1999), Age of Influence: Reflections in the Mirror of American Culture (2000), Universal Experience: Art, Life, and the Tourist's Eye (2005), and Figures in the Field: Figurative Sculpture and Abstract Painting from Chicago Collections (2006).

Stingel's full range of work, including his recent portraits and self portraits, are represented in this career survey, along with a new sitespecific installation created for each venue. Unique to the MCA, Stingel is covering the front atrium lobby wall with silver panels that visitors can write on or cut into, altering the work over the course of the exhibition. When Stingel originally showed his silver paintings he found that visitors repeatedly scrawled on them, so he pushed the idea further, challenging visitors to question their ideas about what surfaces invite graffiti. Stingel takes the language of public rest rooms, bus stops, and underpasses and puts them into a museum setting, undermining the space and people's perception of painting.

Stingel plays with the idea of art and decoration, often placing on the wall what is typically found on the floor, and vice versa. Similar to the way that he may install a carpet on the wall of an exhibition space, Stingel hangs largescalepanels of Styrofoam, some with surfaces that depict deep footprints. To make these Styrofoam works, Stingel steps in acid and then walks across and marks the surface. Both the carpets and the Styrofoam works document the physical interaction between the work and human contact, either by the artist or visitors.

Stingel has produced various bodies of work over the past twenty years that highlight his highly original process of creating art, but the unifying theme of the exhibition is Stingel's connection with painting. Even the sculptural works such as Untitled (199496), depicting an Indian deity with many arms holding a mixer, scissors, paintbrush, spatula, paint tube, and compressed air gun, refer back to painting by holding the essential tools to create a painting in its hands. Although having worked and lived in New York City
since 1987 when he left Italy, Stingel continues a European relation to the history of painting that he both parodies and glorifies in the process of his dissection.

For the most recent body of work in the exhibition, Stingel has been focusing on enormous photorealistic portraits and selfportraits. Included in the last Whitney Biennial, Stingel's self portraits show a dark, melancholic side of the state of mind of the Western artist. These selfreferential paintings about painting manage to both criticize and pay tribute to the artistic process at once, with a humor and beauty that can also be subversive.

Exhibition tour: Whitney Museum of American Art: June 28 October 14, 2007. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue, Rudolf Stingel, with essays by Francesco Bonami, MCA Manilow Senior Curator at Large; Chrissie Iles, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art; and Reiner Zettl, Assistant Professor at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, Austria. The catalogue provides a comprehensive look at Stingel's work which seeks to demystify the artist, the artistic process, and the art object. His full range of work, including his recent portraits and self portraits, are represented in this handsome volume. With important contributions by Francesco Bonami and Whitney Curator Chrissie Iles, Rudolf Stingel is the first to examine the broader implications of the artist’s creative practice in contemporary society. Published in association with the MCA Chicago. 9 1/2 x 11 3/4 in, 256 pages, 90 color illustrations, $55.00, hardcover.