Blinky Palermo, artistic name of Peter Schwarze (2 June 1943 - 18 February 1977), was a German abstract painter. He was inspired by painters like Kazimir Malevich, Barnett Newman and Ellsworth Kelly.[1]
Life and career
Palermo was born Peter Schwarze in Leipzig, Germany, in 1943, and adopted as an infant, with his twin brother, Michael, by foster parents named Heisterkamp. He assumed the pseudonym "Blinky Palermo" in 1964, during his studies with Bruno Goller and Joseph Beuys at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf between 1962 and 1967. The name refers to Frank "Blinky" Palermo, an AmericanMafioso and boxing promoter who managed Sonny Liston.[2]
Blinky Palermo died in 1977, aged 33, during a trip[3] to the Maldives, of causes that often are referred to as "mysterious" but widely acknowledged as related to Palermo's drug use.[4] His brother Michael Heisterkamp is the sole heir and owner of the copyright of Palermo.[5]
Work
Palermo was best known for his spare monochromatic canvases and "fabric paintings" made from simple lengths of colored material cut, stitched and stretched over a frame. He painted on aluminum, steel, wood, paper and Formica, often making lines out of tape instead of paint.
Under Beuys, he became increasingly interested in the organized spatial relationship between form and colour, a polarity which is manifest throughout the rest of his oeuvre. In the mid-1960s, Palermo moved away from conventional rectangular canvases and increasingly opted for surfaces such as the circle, triangle, cruciform, totem pole and even the interior walls of buildings.[6] For example, Untitled (Totem) (1964) "...is simply a vertical strip of wood, 7 feet by about 2 inches. It is painted orange and punctuated, like a primitive ladder, with five short, horizontal pieces of canvas-wrapped wood, each painted white with a portion of a blue triangle".[7] Between 1964 and 1966, Palermo produced a small series of paintings on canvas in which he experimented with constructivist principles of order.[8]
Between late 1966 and 1972 he produced a series of circa 65 Stoffbilder (Fabric Paintings), consisting of colored materials of different widths sewn together along horizontal or vertical seams and attached to stretchers. He took the colour and material quality ready-made from department-store fabrics and had them stitched together by others.[3]
In 1970, he and Gerhard Richter jointly submitted designs for the sports facilities for the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. For the front of the arena, they proposed an array of glass windows in 27 colors; each color would appear 50 times, with the distribution determined randomly.
Beginning in 1968, Palermo realized more than 20 murals and wall drawings at various sites in Europe, including Edinburgh and Brussels, and recorded them in preparatory sketches and photographic documentation. The original works, however, having been affiliated with their place of installation, no longer exist.[9] His Times of the Day I-IV consists of square, aluminum panels painted in colors arranged from bright to dark, a metaphor for the changing sunlight through the day.[10] He often outlined the shapes of some of the walls in a given room or filled them in with a different color, leaving only a border of the original white.[11] A series of “Metallbilder” (Metal Pictures) followed in 1972, a series of acrylic paintings on steel or aluminium.[12] They follow a consistent formula: groupings of, usually, four panels, fairly widely separated, with each panel bearing a single main acrylic color area bracketed by bands of one other color at the top and the bottom.[11]
After visiting New York with Gerhard Richter in 1970, he moved his practice to New York City in December 1973. Once back in Düsseldorf he produced To the People of New York City (1976), a 15-part work comprising 39 aluminum panels painted in variations of cadmium red, cadmium yellow, and black — the colors of the West and East German flags (and now the German one) - ever changing in pattern. It was shown at the Heiner Friedrich Gallery, New York, in 1977, and at the Dia Art Foundation in 1987.[9]
Palermo's auction record is held by Untitled (1970), one of his “Stoffbilder”, a series of fabric paintings, who sold by $6.4 million at Sotheby's, on 25 May 2023.[15] The previous record was held by the fabric painting Rot / Gelb (1968), a slender vertical work measuring approximately 6 1/2 feet high. It sold at Sotheby's, New York, in May 2017 and made $4.5 million.[16] Since Palermo produced only about 56 or so "Stoffbilder" or Fabric Paintings, they are highly sought-after by collectors. All but one of the top five highest priced Palermo works at auction have been Stoffbilder. The exception is Manhattan, a 1976 painting consisting of acrylic on steel, in two parts. Manhattan sold at Sotheby's, London, in July 2020 for $2,893,578. Untitled (Stoffbild) (1967–69), a large square panel of cotton fabric on burlap, painted with two bands of solid color of uneven height, respectively dark blue and turquoise, is currently the 4th-highest priced lot.[17] Auctioned from the collection of Gerhard and Anna Lenz at Sotheby's London in 2010, it sold for £1.11 million.[8]
The Unexpected Death of Blinky Palermo in the Tropics became the title of a painting by Julian Schnabel, now part of the collection of the Stedelijk Museum. In 1993, it was damaged during a rainstorm.[18]
Further reading
Blinky Palermo: To the People of New York City. New York: Dia Art Foundation, in association with Richter Verlag, 2009. Essays by Lynne Cooke, Pia Gottschaller, Jaleh Mansoor, Christine Mehring, David Reed, Anne Rorimer, Dieter Schwarz, and Bernhard Schwenk.
The ballad of Blinky Palermo by Brooks Adams in Art in America, June–July, 2005.
Blinky Palermo: Abstraction of an Era, Christine Mehring, Yale University Press, 2008.
Palermo, Edited by: Susanne Küper, Ulrike Groos, Vanessa Joan Müller. Texts by Matthew Antezzo, Yve-Alain Bois, Anne-Marie Bonnet, Benjamin Buchloh, Lynne Cooke, Erich Franz, Heiner Friedrich, Liam Gillick, Pia Gottschaller, Alan Johnston, John Knight, Susanne Küper, Thomas Lange, Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith, Christine Mehring, Ernst Mitzka, David Reed, Ilka and Andreas Ruby, Thomas Scheibitz, Logan Sisley, Ann Temkin, Lawrence Weiner, Moritz Wesseler, Helen Winkler and others.
Palermo: Works on Paper 1976-1977, New York: David Zwirner Books/Radius Books, 2014. Texts by Christine Mehring and Christoph Schreier.
^Richerdt, Dirk (October 25, 2011). "Palermos Zwillingsbruder / Palermo's Twin Brother". Rheinische Post. Archived from the original on December 14, 2014. Retrieved December 14, 2014. Michael Heisterkamp ist Alleinerbe und Inhaber des Urheberrechts von Palermo. / Michael Heisterkamp is the sole heir of Palermo's estate.
