NEW YORK—The Paula Cooper Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by internationally acclaimed artist Rudolf Stingel. The exhibition will be on view from February 12 through March 12, 2005.

Rudolf Stingel is known for creating works that at once radically demystify the artistic process and gratify the viewer with direct aesthetic pleasure. For this exhibition, Stingel will install a gallery-wide floor made of white-painted particle-board. The white floor turns the gallery space into a vast immaculate expanse, which will progressively become stained and mottled under the footsteps of gallery visitors. Stingel’s floor installation transforms our perception of space and the well-known “purity” of the white cube, so ubiquitous in critical discourse on contemporary art in the last 30 years. Overlooking this blank, pristine landscape will be one photorealist painting of Paula Cooper, who has been Stingel’s dealer for more than ten years.

Although Stingel considers himself a painter, his work often takes the form of all-over interventions in architectural space, broadening and destabilizing the definition of traditional painting. Most recently, Stingel covered the entire floor of Grand Central Terminal’s Vanderbilt Hall with an industrially-printed pink and blue floral carpet, thus not only providing visitors with a kaleidoscopic visual environment, but also injecting a calculated dose of kitsch into this grand, Beaux-Arts structure. At the heart of Stingel’s practice is an attempt to debunk the transcendental and metaphysical loftiness sometimes associated with abstract art (he once printed an instruction manual for DIY monochrome paintings) as well as uncover the traditionally repressed elements of Modernist painting, such as the industrial and the decorative.

Rudolf Stingel was born in 1956 in Merano, Italy. His work has been exhibited in prominent exhibitions both nationally and internationally, most recently at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and in a one-person exhibition at the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt. His work has also been included in the 2003 Venice Biennale and in exhibitions at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Rooseum Center for Contemporary Art, Malmö, Sweden; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. In 2001, his work was the subject of a mid-career retrospective at the Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Trento, Italy.

For more information, please contact the gallery: (212) 255-1105 or
info@paulacoopergallery.com