Rudolf Stingel (b. 1956)

Included in Rudolf Stingel's retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Untitled is an important and large scale example of his Styrofoam series. the notion of the artist's mark, which was so crucial to Pollock and his fellow Abstract Expressionists, has been extended and undermined by Stingel, who has created Untitled by wearing boots which have been dipped in lacquer thinner; this causes a chemical reaction, meaning that the Styrofoam erodes on exposure to the substance. He has taken this logic that allowed Pollock to paint by throwing the oils at his canvas, removing the brush, to an absurd new extreme. This, then is anti-painting, with Stingel creating by destroying, using a material that eats away the formerly hallowed picture surface, that the two-dimensional arena so worshipped by Clement Greenberg and so many of the artists of his generation, resulting in troughs upon the surface rather than the impastoes of those Action Painters of yore while still involving and playfully evoking a different form of action. In Untitled, Stingel has deftly and eloquently combined notions of taste, the creative urge, the hiearchies that pervade so much in the art world and the democratisation of art which he embraces in order to create an expansive work which remains both visually engaging and crucially seductive.