Death in America (# 3)

Steven Parrino was part of a generation of artists whose work evolved in the East Village scene during the early 1980s. His work has been shown alongside artists as diverse as Jack Goldstein, Sherrie Levine, Cady Noland, and Mike Kelley. Parrino's work negates the precepts of Pop Minimalism and Arte Povera by entering into a nihilistic dialogue with these artistic movements. He has made a career out of demolishing the traditions and reverence for painting. Much of his practice of contorting canvases intersects with the tradition in Baroque sculpture in which rendered cloth is pulled away from its task of defining the figure and utilized for expressive purposes. In most of Parrino's work, contortion is accomplished by using excess canvas. This is remarkably similar to what happens in Bernini's Ecstasy of St. Teresa, where lavish drapery seems to extrude from the relatively frontal sculptural composition to create an aggressive new foreground. Lacking critical support in the US, Parrino's oeuvre has been enthusiastically supported by European museums and galleries while remaining relatively unknown here. A critical reappraisal of the work is already underway, brought about by his growing sphere of influence in the discussion of the direction of contemporary painting.