Gagosian is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Rudolf Stingel- the inaugural presentation of the artist’s 2024 series, Vineyard Paintings.
Stingel has spent his career in pursuit of exposing the mechanisms of painting, challenging its boundaries and conventions and confronting the notion of its obsolescence. In a new and enchanting body of work, he turns to the roots of abstraction and its mimetic relationship to nature. These paintings negotiate the threshold between nature and the studio and are imbued with poetic references to time, memory, and sensation.
Returning to a method from earlier in his practice—spraying pigment through fabric gauze—Stingel produced this latest series in his studio on the Massachusetts island of Martha’s Vineyard. The works, consisting of vertical canvases of identical proportions, and square canvases of a smaller scale, shift between vantage points across real and imagined perspectives. They reflect not only the trees encircling his remote working space, but also distant memories of the Alpine landscapes of his youth and the aerial contours of mountainous terrain.
With the Vineyard Paintings, Stingel renews his dialogue with the history of painting, revealing the enduring exchange between nature and abstraction. Through layered textures and a vibrant gold-and-green palette, the works’ surfaces suggest natural phenomena—bare trees bathed in sunlight, the first budding leaves of spring, or the sun-scorched grass of late summer. Viewed up close, gauze imprints and fabric folds emerge, resembling golden stage curtains and recalling the illusionistic qualities of old master painting that work to destabilize the viewer’s sense of time and space. As in previous works, Stingel incorporates the artificial to expose artifice itself—drawing the viewer’s attention back to the picture’s surface and its constructed makeup. These new paintings simultaneously embrace and subvert the tropes of abstraction and mark a subtle yet significant evolution in the artist’s practice, deepening his ability to channel memory and sensory experience through formal means.
Indebted to questions around painting’s longevity, a topic that intensified in the 1980s, Stingel continues to identify new possibilities for its future by breathing fresh life into familiar processes. In Vineyard Paintings, the histories of abstraction and landscape are celebrated, and painting’s dialogue with nature—in all its complexity as sublime, emotive force, complex web of networks, and mirror of the divine—is in full view. With this new body of work, he provides a platform to consider painting’s attunement with reality, not solely as reflecting the world, but as engaging with it critically and revealing its hidden dimensions.
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue illustrating the complete series.
