The Paula Cooper Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Rudolf Stingel, on view from 2 February through 2 March, 2002.

This exhibition will consist of insulation panels laminated with aluminum foil and installed to entirely cover the walls, ceiling and furniture of the gallery’s foyer and hallways. The aluminum will not only make visible the “negative spaces” of the gallery (the spaces not traditionally used for exhibiting art), but will also function as a sensitive surface on which traces and inscriptions from visitors will gradually appear. In the gallery’s main exhibition spaces, Stingel will hang paintings composed of “cut-outs” or fragments from previously exhibited aluminum foil panels showing their variously altered surfaces.

As with his well-known floor-to-ceiling or wall-to-wall carpet pieces, Stingel’s shimmering and reflective intervention in the gallery space expands the visual field to encompass the entire environment, uniting image and space, figure and ground. The graffiti-covered paintings, on the other hand, reference gestural abstraction, graffiti art and Villeglé-style décollage, but are in fact palimpsests untouched by the artist, recording their previous viewers’ responses.

Rudolf Stingel was born in 1956 in Merano, Italy.  His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, most recently at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, the Rooseum Center for Contemporary Art, Malmö, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.  In the spring of 2001, he was the subject of a one-person exhibition at the Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Trento, Italy, where the present aluminum foil cut-outs were produced.

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