Rudolf Stingel

[2] Using readily available materials such as styrofoam, carpet, and cast polyurethane, Stingel creates art based upon an underlying conceptual framework and challenges contemporary notions about painting.

Stingel's later abstract paintings from the 1990s consist of oils in pure, brilliant colors exuberantly splayed, dripped, pressed, and pulled across a black field.

[7][8] At the Venice Biennale in 1989, he published an illustrated "do-it-yourself" manual in English, Italian, German, French, Spanish and Japanese, Instructions, Istruzioni, Anleitung..., outlining the equipment and procedure that would enable anyone to create one of his paintings.

[13] In his site-specific Plan B (2004), he covered the entire floors of Grand Central Terminal’s Vanderbilt Hall and the Walker Art Center with an industrially-printed pink and blue floral carpet.

[14] Simultaneously in Frankfurt am Main, Stingel completely resurfaced one of the rooms of the Museum für Moderne Kunst – walls, columns and floor – with bright red and silver insulation panels printed with a traditional damask wallpaper motif.

[16] As part of his 2007 mid-career retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the artist covered the gallery walls with metallic Celotex insulation board[14] and invited visitors to draw, write and make imprints on the surface of the softly reflective silver panelling, effectively removing artistic privilege from the mark of the individual and handing it over to the collective gestures of thousands of viewers.

[17] His paintings from that period are often created through a performative process in which Stingel covers the entire floor of his studio with Styrofoam and then walks across the thick surface in boots dipped in lacquer thinner.

LIVE” at Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin in 2010, a series of immense landscape paintings measuring up to fifteen feet in width is based on vintage black-and-white photographs of Stingel's birthplace, Merano, in the Tyrolean Alps.

[21] Stingel's prices skyrocketed after his 2007 show at the Whitney Museum in New York, until a big Styrofoam board fetched $1.9 million at Phillips de Pury & Company.