Lot Essay
The artist known today as Blinky Palermo was born in 1943 and was originally given the name Peter Heisterkamp by his adoptive parents. As a student of Joseph Beuys at the Academy of Art in Dusseldorf, he became close friends with his fellow students at the time, Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke. Unlike these artists, however, who breathed new life into figurative painting in Germany in the early 1960s, Palermo quickly abandoned figuration and began working on rigid, minimalist compositions founded purely on the spatial relationships between form and colour as early as 1964.
The Untitled work from 1973 is one of Palermo's first experiments with painting on metal, a technique he would continue to develop until his untimely death in 1977. 1973 was a pivotal year in Palermo's life and work, having left Dusseldorf to move to New York City. "Whilst the impressive colour effect is central to Palermo's metal pictures, another aspect which was of equal importance to the artist was the way these pictures should be hung on the wall. As with his earlier series, Palermo again integrates the wall into his work." (In: Palermo. Bilder und Objeckte, Klaus Schrenk, Stuttgart 1995, p. 32). The present work, for example, should be hung at precisely 2.5cm from the wall, making it seem to float in space in much the same way that the hanging of Yves Klein's first monochrome blue paintings at a distance from the wall also made them seem to hover in space. And like Klein's IKB paintings, Palermo's monochrome panels unite form, colour and space to give physical presence to spiritual forces.
The Untitled work from 1973 is one of Palermo's first experiments with painting on metal, a technique he would continue to develop until his untimely death in 1977. 1973 was a pivotal year in Palermo's life and work, having left Dusseldorf to move to New York City. "Whilst the impressive colour effect is central to Palermo's metal pictures, another aspect which was of equal importance to the artist was the way these pictures should be hung on the wall. As with his earlier series, Palermo again integrates the wall into his work." (In: Palermo. Bilder und Objeckte, Klaus Schrenk, Stuttgart 1995, p. 32). The present work, for example, should be hung at precisely 2.5cm from the wall, making it seem to float in space in much the same way that the hanging of Yves Klein's first monochrome blue paintings at a distance from the wall also made them seem to hover in space. And like Klein's IKB paintings, Palermo's monochrome panels unite form, colour and space to give physical presence to spiritual forces.