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.

Stingel’s Celotex installations have been presented at institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (2006); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2007); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2010); and Fondation Beyeler, Basel/Riehen, Switzerland (2019); among others. Fresh paint: Rudolf Stingel marks the first time one of these works will be presented on Long Island.

Fresh paint is a rotating series of single-artwork exhibitions at the Parrish that spotlights new or never-before-exhibited works by both emerging and established artists. By circumventing traditional exhibition planning timelines—which can extend years into the future—Fresh paint provides a platform for artists to promptly showcase freshly created artworks and ideas, allowing for a more direct response to current issues and cultural movements. This approach fosters a timelier dialogue between the Museum, visitors, and our surrounding community. Presented in the Parrish’s Creativity Lounge located in the Lobby, Fresh paint is open to the public at no charge during regular Museum hours.

Each Fresh paint installation is accompanied by two sets of interpretative texts: one is a commissioned piece of writing by an invited author, critic, poet, or scholar; the other is a collaboration between members of the Parrish Teen Council ARTscope, a youth-focused educational initiative that offers participants a comprehensive exploration of the visual arts, career pathways, and practical experience in museum operations.

Fresh paint: Rudolf Stingel is organized by Scout Hutchinson, The Flag Art Foundation Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at the Parrish Art Museum, in collaboration with Jon Rider, Director, and Caroline Cassidy, Director of Exhibitions, at Flag.