Blinky Palermo (1943 - 1977) Germany
Watercolor and Ink on Paper
Measure 24"in H x 20"in W and 32"in H x 28"in W with frame

Known for: Color fields, installation views
Biography: Blinky Palermo was the third name taken by a troubled artist born as Peter Schwarze in Leipzig in 1944, in what would shortly become East Germany. He and his twin brother, adopted as infants by a family named Heisterkamp, were then given that name. The family soon moved to the West German city of Munster, where Palermo's adoptive mother fell seriously ill and died when the boy was fifteen. Joseph Beuys's, the notorious German conceptualist and Dadaist theorist, remembered Palermo as an artist who "left behind a fragment in which one can nevertheless feel the impulsethe impulse of the era." Essentially a brightly colored geometric minimalist, stripe and color field painter, very much in step with the abstract geometric fashion of the day, Palermo created four distinct bodies of work. In his "Stoffbilder," the so-called cloth pictures, Palermo would shop local department stores for lengths of commercially dyed monochrome cloth. He would have two or three of these sewn together (initially by his first wife, Ingrid) and then mount the joined bands on stretchers usually measuring two by two meters (roughly six feet six inches square). The cloth pictures convey Palermo's passion for color and its combinations: bright blue and red; orange and dark blue; pink, orange and black; light blue, green and red. The cloth pictures were large in size and installed low, about a foot from the floor. His first had vertical divisions that he soon gave up, perhaps because he liked the landscape allusion of the horizontal line. Palermo followed the modernist dictum of flatness and "purity." His colorful, flat, blank canvases, seem to typify the "American" look, which positioned the work well for German collectors, who were at the time emptying their wallets for art made in the USA. Clement Greenberg stated that "a stretched or tacked-up canvas already exists as a picturethough not necessarily as a successful one." Blinky Palermo moved to New York in 1973, four years before his death. While many of his German contemporaries felt threatened by invading American art, Palermo responded to it, introducing a number of his Dusseldorf friends, including Richter, to the big names of New York painting. In New York, he moved to painting acrylics on metal, his third group of works. A painting like "Times of the Day I" is an example of his serial structures usually comprising four rectangular aluminum panels mounted away from the wall and at large intervals from one another. Applying intense acrylic colors with fairly visible brushstrokes, Palermo painted horizontal bands at the top and bottom of each panel to frame a central field. Palermo, a charming womanizer who lived only thirty-three years, was notoriously quiet in public, and especially reserved about his art. There were problems with alcohol and drugs, and he died in 1977 on the remote Maldive island of Kurumba.

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