Rudolf Stingel

Rudolf Stingel, born in 1956 in Merano, Italy, is a New York City-based artist who encourages dialogue with his audience about their perceptions of art. Stingel's work employs Conceptual painting and installations to explore the creative process, using common materials such as styrofoam, carpet, and cast polyurethane to challenge contemporary painting norms. The surfaces of his two-dimensional works often bear the visible marks of the artist's alterations to industrial materials.

Stingel has exhibited his work in the 1999 and 2003 Venice Biennales and was the subject of a mid-career retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in 2007. The exhibition later traveled to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. For his first solo museum show in the United States, Stingel transformed the MCA's atrium space and a gallery at the Whitney with an aluminum-faced installation and invited the public to scratch messages and images into the soft walls. Stingel divides his time between New York City and Merano, Italy.