Untitled

Rudolf Stingel was born in picturesque northern Italy. His hometown, Merano, is nestled in a wide valley, quietly sitting between eleven-thousand-foot-high mountains, with the Passer River flowing through its city center of white church spires and red roofs. In Untitled, however, Stingel presents a very different image of the charming hill town in the Alps. Though derived from an antique postcard, the painting does not advertise Merano like a postcard would; the painting is untitled, deployed with flat, black-and-white finish, and Stingel left the canvas on the floor of his studio for months as he and others walked across its surface. The result is not romantic, but instead a study of how to drain a painting of romanticism’s intrigues.