Background
Blinky 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, who moved to Munster in what was then West Germany in 1952.
Blinky 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, who moved to Munster in what was then West Germany in 1952.
In 1962, at the age of eighteen, Palermo applied to the Art Academy in Düsseldorf, and after two years of painting, he decided to study under Joseph Beuys, although his own work was in many aspects antagonistic to that of his charismatic teacher.
Around 1964 the artist took the name Blinky Palermo, after the mobster manager of boxer Sonny Liston. For over ten years he exhibited worldwide. In 1969, Blinky moved to Mönchengladbach and set up a studio he would share with Imi Knoebel and Ulrich Rückriem. After a stay in New York in the early 1970s, he moved into Gerhard Richter's former Düsseldorf studio.
Blinky was increasingly interested in the organized spatial relationship between form and colour, a polarity which was manifest throughout the rest of his oeuvre. In the mid-1960s, he 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. Between 1964 and 1966, Palermo produced a small series of paintings on canvas in which he experimented with constructivist principles of order.
Between late 1966 and 1972, he produced a series of circa 65 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. In 1970, Blinky 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 created 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. 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. 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. A series of “Metallbilder”, followed in 1972, was a series of acrylic paintings on steel or aluminum. They followed a consistent formula: groupings of 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.
After visiting New York with Gerhard Richter in 1970, Palermo moved his practice to New York City in December 1973. Once back in Düsseldorf he produced "To the People of New York City" in 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 - ever changing in pattern. It was shown at the Heiner Friedrich Gallery, New York, in 1977, and at the Dia Art Foundation in 1987. Blinky Palermo died in 1977, aged 33, during his trip to the Maldives, of causes that often are referred to as "mysterious" but widely acknowledged as related to Palermo's drug use.
Komposition Blau-Rot auf Weiss
Untitled
Ohne Titel
Blau auf Grün
Fensterkreuz II
Tablettenbild
unknown title
Mirror Object
Coney Island II
Ohne Titel (für Peter Dibke)
Komposition mit 8 roten Rechtecken (Composition with 8 Red Rectangles)
Butterfly II
Graue Scheibe
Ohne Titel
Ohne Titel (für Thordes)
Ohne Titel
Who knows the beginning and who knows the end I
Ohne Titel
Who knows the beginning and who knows the end II
Ohne Titel (mit rotem Strich)
untitled (T-formiges Objekt mit Gouache)
Untitled
Untitled (Stoffbild)
Blinky Palermo grew up enthralled by American culture, especially the Beat Generation and the Abstract Expressionists. His work is often characterized by geometric shapes and vibrant, saturated colors. Palermo's work can be seen as exemplifying an important transition from the Romantic concept of art to the materialist one.
Palermo lived recklessly. He drank far too much, as he acknowledged.
Palermo was married twice and had innumerable affairs.