This six-armed Buddha equipped with Stingel’s “Instructions” for producing abstract pictures – a tube of colour, and electric mixer, a wide brush, a pair of scissors for cutting gauze, a decorator’s spatula and an airbrush – is an addition to a work already in the evn collection. They approach the problem of the effect of the surface of the picture support and its colouring in a different way to a painted picture.

This Buddha, a domesticated icon of becoming empty, is a conscious reference to the origins and intentions of the picture, sculpture and room installation in which Stingel achieves a pictorial effect as primary (and thus as lasting) as possible, reduced to the simple application of a repetitive way of working. The aspect of the production of multiples – as opposed to unique works – is, like the endeavour of passing the technical instructions for production, evidence of Stingel’s interest in conceptual and selective work, which also consciously seeks to avoid the superficial handcraft and the fetish-like quality of unique works.

Paul Katzberger, 2005 (translation: Tim Sharp)