Blinky Palermo

We are pleased to announce the exhibition Blinky Palermo: Prints, at Carolina Nitsch Project Room. This show will bring together the 4 Prototypes (1970); T, 1970; Projection (1971), 5 Miniatures (1972); Heinz Gappmayr visual poems (1972); Solution to wall painting, Hamburger Kunstverein (1973), and a selection of posters from Palermo exhibitions from the early 1970’s.

Blinky Palermo (born Peter Schwarze, 1943–1977) assumed the name of a Mafioso and boxing promoter in 1964, while a student of Joseph Beuys. Throughout his short career, he investigated color abstraction with attention to material, surface and spatial relationships. His pieces often have a sense of delicate stillness that affords reflection. There are nods to gestural abstraction and incomplete figurative elements. Palermo’s works are often categorized into four key groupings; the objects, the Cloth Pictures (Stoffbilder), the in situ Wall Paintings and Drawings, and the late Metal Pictures. The prints in this exhibition offer distillations of each of these areas of interest.

The 4 Prototypes (1970) are simple shapes that recur in Palermo’s sculpture and painting, particularly the blue triangle, which was a favorite and was created as a stencil and sculpture intended to hang over a door way lintel to punctuate an interior architectural space. Similarly the T form was also created as a sculptural form as slightly warped T shapes of wood painted red. The 5 Miniatures (1972) and the Heinz Gappmayr visual poems (1972) relate more closely to Palermo’s paintings on aluminum and fabric collages. These two suites employ foil stamping to collage abstract color forms into various combinations. Heinz Gappmayr was an Austrian artist who created visual Poems that were clearly an influence on Palermo. The Mappe zur Wandmalerei. Hamburger Kunstverein (1973), is a two dimensional representation of an installation that Palermo created at the Hamburg Art association. Palermo emphasized the flexible partitions of the Kunstverein in oxblood red paint while leaving the outside wall white and drawing the topographic layout of the partitions onto the main wall.