Instructions / Istruzioni / Anleitung / Mode d'Emploi / Instrucciones /

Milan: Nava web ... fro Italiana di Comunicazione, 1989. Two leaves with orange borders added by hand around two photos, otherwise in fine original condition. 12 unnumbered leaves. 8vo (209 x 149 mm).  Leaf with title with artist's name, verso and following leaves with 12 repeated pictorial spreads with explanatory text in six sections divided by language, two spreads per language (English, Italian, German, French, Spanish and Japanese); photographic reproductions of images by Santi Caleca, images and text with key numbers in orange. Original publisher's orange printed wrappers stapled as issued, the key image printed to the inner side of the front wrapper, front cover with flap with illustration on inner side. Published to coincide with Stingel's first exhibition in 1989 at the Massimo de Carlo Gallery, Milan, the artist book 'Instructions / Istruzioni / Anleitung / Mode d'Emploi / Instrucciones / ', Instructions (Milan, 1989) is the modest-looking but decisive booklet with which Stingel announced himself as a serious and unsettling intelligence in contemporary art.

Published as a small, utilitarian manual, Instructions lays out a set of clear, procedural directions for producing paintings—most notably the now-iconic silver monochrome surfaces made by applying metallic paint through commercial insulation material. The tone is deliberately neutral, almost industrial. There is no rhetoric, no theory, no romanticism. What you encounter instead is a cool transfer of knowledge: materials, steps, outcomes.

Copies are quite scarce, either in the market or in institutions. [see Francesco Bonami's 'Rudolf Stingel', 2007, pg. 18].