oil on canvas mounted on cut frame and paint on the ground
590.0 x 212.0 (cm)
232.3 x 83.5 (inch)
At the end of the 1960s, as one of the forerunners of European Pop Art, Peter Stämpfli developed a radically new pictorial language which featured an extreme enlargement of what he (paradoxically) calls the ‘sculpture of tire’. From this sole and specific subject, he revisited the history of geometrical abstraction, transforming a very ordinary theme to illustrate ‘the power of the art to convert every element with aesthetical qualities’ (Henry Martin, in Art International, 1971). Royal is a monumental installation made of a large-scale canvas depicting a tire in a vertical position, which extends to the floor by a trompe-l’oeil tire mark (of variable dimension), giving an impression of speed and movement. It is the first significant landmark from a series of nine, six of which are already in museum collections; it was created on the occasion of the 7th Paris Biennale in 1971 and was shown in 1979 at the The Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Saint-Étienne Métropole in a survey show. It has not been exhibited for more than 20 years.
