WEBSITE: www.palazzograssi.it
LOCATION: Palazzo Grassi
For the Exhibition RUDOLF STINGEL, François Pinault invited the artist to devise, in absolute freedom, an installation involving the totality of the spaces at Palazzo Grassi, in Venice Italy. The exhibition Rudolf Stingel unfolds over the atrium and both upper floors of Palazzo Grassi, a space of over 5,000 square meters. For the first time, Palazzo Grassi will devote the entirety of its space to the work of a single artist. It includes a site-specific installation as well as recent creations and previously unseen paintings. This will be Stingel’s largest ever monographic presentation in Europe and his first solo exhibition in an Italian museum since his mid-career retrospective at MART in 2001. The project, conceived by the artist expressly for Palazzo Grassi, spreads over all the rooms of the building, where a carpet with oriental patterns covers, for the first time, the entire surface of the walls and floors. The installation is part of Stingel’s artistic research, which has always been directed towards the analysis of the relationship between the exhibition space and artistic intervention: for the artist, the carpet is a medium through which painting relates to its architectural context. Interested in the redefinition of the meaning of “painting” and of its perception, Stingel places the “carpet” at the core of his poetics. It bears witness to the passage of time and people and is also a source of inspiration, with its variety of typologies and textures, for successive series of paintings.