"Given his premature death and lack of written material, any interpretation (of Palermo' work) seems to go ... Yet nobody really pinpoints what might make Palermo an artist of relevance. It seems to be a given but an unexplained given." (Luis Camnitzer)
In 1977 German painter Blinky Palermo died unexpectedly at the age of 33 on a vacation trip to Kurumba. Born as Peter Schwarz, he got adopted by the family Heisterkamp and studied art under Josef Beuys who gave him the friendly advice to take an artist name for an artist's career. By then he already had the nickname Blinky, Palermo was suggested by a friend who thought Peter Schwarz's outfit reminded him of the American Mafioso and boxing promoter Frank "Blinky" Palermo. He stayed in Düsseldorf for a while, took over Gerhard Richter's studio in 1970, moved his practice to New York in 1973, and returned to Düsseldorf in 1976. All his work was produced within 13 years, some of it he rejected and destroyed. Although Palermo had achieved widespread recognition in Germany and other parts of Europe, staying in New York did not advance his career; he was part of a downtown scene, was ignored by the institutions, and did not sell work nor had public commissions within the states. He developed a unique European model that responds in parts to what was going on in the US at that time and at the same time he did not in the modernist sense of progression follow any particular art movement. Consistently seeking new findings within painting, he experimented with relationships between form and color, with constructivist principles of order, with materials, modes of exhibition in space, he painted on aluminum, steel, wood, paper, Formica and directly on the wall, sometimes drawing lines out of tape instead of paint. Between 1966 and 1972, Palermo made around 65 "Stoffbilder" (Cloth Paintings). Each work is made of two or three sheets of store-bought cotton fabric, dyed with fabric dyes in exquisite color combinations, machine-sewn together by the mother of his gallerist Max Hetzler or Gerhard Richter's first wife, and stretched over a frame. They look simple and effortless, like glowing optical units, recognizably paintings which emphasize the gesture of the artist to retract brushstrokes.
From a distance the Stoffbilder seem similar to the abutted monochrome panels by Brice Marden from the same time. Marden starts to make monochrome paintings in 1964. He uses the trope of Minimalism’s riposte to rhetorical painting—yet he employs a deeply sensuous treatment: slicked-up, paint-plastered canvases coated with beeswax, in earthy colors of grays and murk. Over the course of a few pages in the 1964–1967 notebook, one can find sporadic checklists of paints which read like a chemical lab of forbidden substances: “Mars black, lemon yellow, use muddy white … cobalt violet, cad. red light, perm. green to grey, white, cad. yellow pale and lamp black … cobalt blue … raw amber … chrome oxide opaque, Windsor green, viridian, burnt amber … ” In 1968 he proceeded to combine the monochrome panels to diptychs or triptychs. 1974 Palermo and Marden met in New York and became friends.
Curator Lynne Cook in conversation with artist Mathias Poledna on the occasion of a Palermo Retrospective, LACMA, 2010–11 (18:35 Min.)
Artists on Artists Lecture Series: Luis Camnitzer on Blinky Palermo at Dia Art Foundation, 2010 (1:02:41 Min.)
