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Lot Essay
The Stoffbilder form the central body of work in Blinky Palermo's wide-ranging but all-too-brief career. Essentially paintings made without the use of paint, they explore the conventional boundaries between painting and sculpture in a way that owes much to the highly experimental age in which they were made.
The Stoffbilder (Fabric Paintings) were produced between1966 and 1972. They were, in part, a radical development of his pseudo-sculptural explorations with the use of pure colour and a response to the demands by contemporary American artists like Donald Judd that the art object - be it a painting or a sculpture - utilize the "more powerful actual space" that it occupies and into which it is set. (Donald Judd, Specific Objects, 1965.) Reflecting a minimal use of means the Stoffbilder can also be seen as a response by Palermo to the contemporaneous work of his two closest artistic colleagues: Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke.
Polke was also using industrially manufactured fabrics in the creation of his fanciful acid-inspired painterly inventions at this time, while Richter was engaged in another painterly parody of industrial materials by producing his manifestly non-ideological Colour Charts. These were a series of hand-painted monochrome coloured rectangles executed using traditional oil-painting techniques that deliberately ironized both the soulless impersonality of the colour charts of industrial paint producers and the inherent Romanticism in the supposed 'expressiveness' of the painterly act.
Palermo's Stoffbilder take much of the logic inherent within Richter's Colour Charts another step further. There is absolutely no room for personal expression in the surface of the Stoffbilder as the colour is conveyed solely through its own material entity. Like Yves Klein's blue pigment or the white of Piero Manzoni's Achromes, the colour in these fabric works is not applied so much as being the product of what the work actually is. In order to emphasize the straightforwardness of this process, Palermo consciously chose colours and combinations of colours that could be matched to those in nature and not ones that suggested the exoticism or artificiality of industrially produced colour. At the same time, there was a certain element of chance or arbitrariness involved in Palermo's choice of colour as he was content to remain reliant upon the manufactured colours that he found to be commercially available.
Palermo's first Stoffbilder made use of vertical strips of cloth, but the artist later rejected these and destroyed them, preferring the use of horizontal strips - probably because of the associations they raise with a sense of landscape and the horizon. Like many of the creations during this period when the absence of authorship was deemed an important element in the making of art, the Stoffbilder are largely self-determining artworks that bridge the gap between art-making and real life. The form, colour and dimensions of the work are therefore determined by the material of which they are made. Most Stoffbilder are square in format and measure 2 x 2m. as Palermo employed the standard manufactured width of fabric as a determinant of each work's dimensions. Each strip of fabric was sewn together with a sewing machine by Palermo's wife, Ingrid Kohlhöfer, and stretched over the edges of the supports so that the sense of the painting as an object was emphasized while simultaneously denying the sense of its surface being artificial and/or illusory.
The Stoffbilder (Fabric Paintings) were produced between1966 and 1972. They were, in part, a radical development of his pseudo-sculptural explorations with the use of pure colour and a response to the demands by contemporary American artists like Donald Judd that the art object - be it a painting or a sculpture - utilize the "more powerful actual space" that it occupies and into which it is set. (Donald Judd, Specific Objects, 1965.) Reflecting a minimal use of means the Stoffbilder can also be seen as a response by Palermo to the contemporaneous work of his two closest artistic colleagues: Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke.
Polke was also using industrially manufactured fabrics in the creation of his fanciful acid-inspired painterly inventions at this time, while Richter was engaged in another painterly parody of industrial materials by producing his manifestly non-ideological Colour Charts. These were a series of hand-painted monochrome coloured rectangles executed using traditional oil-painting techniques that deliberately ironized both the soulless impersonality of the colour charts of industrial paint producers and the inherent Romanticism in the supposed 'expressiveness' of the painterly act.
Palermo's Stoffbilder take much of the logic inherent within Richter's Colour Charts another step further. There is absolutely no room for personal expression in the surface of the Stoffbilder as the colour is conveyed solely through its own material entity. Like Yves Klein's blue pigment or the white of Piero Manzoni's Achromes, the colour in these fabric works is not applied so much as being the product of what the work actually is. In order to emphasize the straightforwardness of this process, Palermo consciously chose colours and combinations of colours that could be matched to those in nature and not ones that suggested the exoticism or artificiality of industrially produced colour. At the same time, there was a certain element of chance or arbitrariness involved in Palermo's choice of colour as he was content to remain reliant upon the manufactured colours that he found to be commercially available.
Palermo's first Stoffbilder made use of vertical strips of cloth, but the artist later rejected these and destroyed them, preferring the use of horizontal strips - probably because of the associations they raise with a sense of landscape and the horizon. Like many of the creations during this period when the absence of authorship was deemed an important element in the making of art, the Stoffbilder are largely self-determining artworks that bridge the gap between art-making and real life. The form, colour and dimensions of the work are therefore determined by the material of which they are made. Most Stoffbilder are square in format and measure 2 x 2m. as Palermo employed the standard manufactured width of fabric as a determinant of each work's dimensions. Each strip of fabric was sewn together with a sewing machine by Palermo's wife, Ingrid Kohlhöfer, and stretched over the edges of the supports so that the sense of the painting as an object was emphasized while simultaneously denying the sense of its surface being artificial and/or illusory.