Rudolf Stingel's Radical Painting at Neue Nationalgalerie

Rudolf Stingel's exhibition at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, on view until August 22, 2010, transforms Mies van der Rohe's modernist temple with a black-and-white carpet mimicking an enlarged Persian rug and an immense chandelier. The show encapsulates Stingel's career-long interrogation of painting's boundaries, surfaces, and materials, from his early instructional manuals to his iconic orange carpets. Stingel, born in 1956 in Merano, Italy, and living between New York and Merano, has built a practice oscillating between conceptual rigor and retinal sensuality, abstraction and figuration. His participatory works, such as the 1993 carpet at the Venice Biennale's Aperto section and the 2003 aluminum insulation installation, invite viewer intervention. Stingel's shift to figuration began with a 2005 portrait of Paula Cooper based on a Robert Mapplethorpe photograph. He curated a show of Sol LeWitt wall drawings at Galleria Massimo De Carlo in Milan. The artist rejects labels, as shown in his email to Massimiliano Gioni: 'I think we should leave it at that.' Stingel's work references Franz Gertsch, Roland Barthes, and the democratic ethos of relational aesthetics, yet remains stubbornly about painting itself.