Description
The Parrish Art Museum and The FLAG Art Foundation continue their FRESH PAINT collaboration with a new work by the artist Rudolf Stingel (American, b. Italy, 1956). At the Parrish, Stingel will present Untitled (2025), a large-scale, interactive installation in the Museum’s Interior Lobby. Untitled is made from a series of Celotex panels—aluminum-faced foam insulation boards—that will cover the entirety of the Lobby’s eastern wall. Its shimmering metallic surface is also malleable and receptive to pressure, inviting visitors to draw into the work’s surface and leave behind marks and impressions of their own designs. Referencing the acts of graffiti and drawing into wet cement, the installation will continue to gather layers of line, text, and image over the course of the presentation, amassing into an extended collaboration between Stingel and the many visitors who come through the Museum’s doors.
Stingel is drawn to Celotex for its ability to hold the trace of human gesture. He first began experimenting with industrial foam in the late 1990s, using Styrofoam panels as a drawing support and as a record of performance, often walking across their surfaces to leave behind impressions of his footprints. In the early 2000s, Stingel shifted from Styrofoam to Celotex and created some of his first immersive installations. For his 2001 exhibition at the Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Trento, Italy, Stingel covered an entire gallery with Celotex panels, onto which visitors wrote and drew, producing an evolving counter-relief painting at an architectural scale. From these major installations, Stingel often casts the individual panels, preserving the collaborative exchanges in copper and gold.
