Blinky Palermo: Abstraction of an Era
Text by Christine Mehring
Twenty-one-year-old Peter Heisterkamp began signing his colorful and playful abstract artworks Palermo in 1964, when peers noted his resemblance to the American gangster Frank “Blinky” Palermo. This handsome book—a historical and critical study of Palermo’s painting from the time he entered Joseph Beuys’s now famous class at the Düsseldorf academy in 1964 to his death in 1977—explores his significance for postwar and abstract art.
Christine Mehring notes that over the course of Palermo’s brief career he created five concurrent but distinct bodies of work: objects, cloth-pictures, wall-paintings, metal-pictures, and collaborative projects, primarily with his friend and colleague Gerhard Richter. Mehring shows how each of these groups demonstrates Palermo’s efforts to lead German art out of its international isolation and to transform modernist painting into historically resonant abstraction by incorporating artifice, humor, period colors, and play.
Publisher: Yale University Press
Artists: Palermo
Contributors: Christine Mehring
Publication Date: 2009
Binding: Hardcover
Dimensions: 8 x 10 in (20.3 x 25.4 cm)
Pages: 320
Reproductions: 64 color, 98 b&w
ISBN: 9780300122381
Retail: $65 US & Canada | £35 | €47
Status: Available
Palermo
(Blinky) Palermo (1943–1977) was born Peter Schwarze in Leipzig. In 1962, he entered the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where he studied with Bruno Goller and then with Joseph Beuys and, in 1964, appropriated the name Blinky Palermo from the American boxing promoter-cum-mafioso Frank “Blinky” Palermo, famous for managing heavyweight champion Sonny Liston. Over the course of his short life, Palermo participated in more than seventy exhibitions worldwide, including Documenta in 1972 and the Venice Biennale in 1975. He has had posthumous retrospectives at the Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland (1984); Kunstmuseum Bonn (1993); Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) (2002); Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (2007); and Dia:Beacon and the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York (CCS Bard) (2011).
Christine Mehring
Christine Mehring holds a PhD from Harvard University and is Department Chair and Professor of Art History at the University of Chicago with interests in postwar European art, abstraction, design, and the relationship between new and old media. Mehring has written extensively on Palermo, including the monograph Blinky Palermo: Abstraction of an Era (2008). In 1999, she curated the exhibition Wols Photographs at the Harvard University Art Museum, and she regularly contributes to exhibition catalogues and publications including Artforum.