Rudolf Stingel is a New York based Conceptual Artist born in Merano, Italy in 1956. His work aims to challenge the publics view on the traditional concept of art, more particularly, the concept of painting. He invites his audience to interact with his works in various ways, creating “public collaborations”. Stingel uses Conceptual installations and paintings to do so. His work involves unlikely materials, such as styrofoam, carpet, and cast polyurethane. Stingel career took off in the 1980’s with his monochromatic silver paintings, with blue, yellow or red tones. In 1989, his work was included in the Venice Biennale, where he created a manual in multiple languages that provided instructions on his process.
In the early 1990s, Stingel began testing the relationship between painting and the spaces where they are shown, developing a series of installations that covered the walls and floors with monochrome carpets—thereby allowing the architecture itself to act as a painting. Stingel has participated in the 1999, 2003, and 2013 Venice Biennales, and was the subject of a mid-career retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 2007.