‘All work is autobiographical, so that’s why I decided to just paint myself ... there’s a big tradition of portraits, and lots of selfportraits too; each artist did it… I just want to go back to a more psychological platform, if you want; reconnecting because of my age and everything to my origins, somehow. It also seemed to me to be the bravest thing I could do’. Rudolf Stingel
Gerhard Richter, Kerze, 1982, oil on canvas, The Art Institute of Chicago. © Gerhard Richter 2019 (0144). Image: Bridgeman Images.
Mobilising photography’s innate ability to capture themes of memory, time and mortality as infltrator, his work exacerbates the underlying conceptual rigour of painting in the twenty-frst century. From the 1989 publication of his seminal Instructions, a limited edition art book that outlined the intricate method by which his early enamel works could be replicated, Stingel’s practice has routinely demystifed studio processes and subverted notions of authorial genius in favour of a sense of industrial manufacture and mechanised nature. A complex conceptual contortion, the present work’s title – Afer Sam – directly acknowledges the photographer, making evident that this self-portrait is the reworking of an existing portrait of Stingel, one made by another artist. In Stingel’s hands, historical reliance on the manual mastery of painting is deconstructed by its meticulous re-assemblance through photography. The ‘authenticity’ of the portrait recoils from both the subject matter of the painting (Stingel) and its creator (the artist’s
hand) towards its source photograph, creating a feedback loop between artist and image, painting and photography, the transience of life and the permanence of art that plays out as if a frozen flm still. A mode of investigation afer the impasse of fgurative painting, these works are, he has said, ‘something more psychological … the only activity in these paintings is self-doubt’ (Rudolf Stingel, ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Self-Portrait’, Parkett 77, 2006, p. 107). The tension between sameness and diference in Stingel’s serially produced self-portraiture is what provides their theoretical undergirding. Stripped of its quest for internal realisation, in Stingel’s hands the self-portrait becomes a tool by which to externalise the intrinsically performative nature of the artist’s subjectivity and creative labour. Rather than a self-portrait of the artist, then, the works are portraits of Rudolf Stingel as an artist – a deadpan send-up of the contemplative image of the painter as Romantic anti-hero.