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Lot Essay
'I pursue no specific direction in the sense of a style... I have no program. What I have is an aesthetic concept, whereby I try to keep as many expressive options open for myself as possible' (B. Palermo, quoted in Palermo, Bilder und Objekte, exh, cat., Von der Heydt-Museum, Wuppertal, 1968, unpaged).
Executed in 1965, Untitled stems from Blinky Palermo’s groundbreaking series of Objects, sculptural paintings made from fragments, found objects, studio detritus and coloured tape that the artist made in Joseph Beuys’ class at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. In its idiosyncratic, near-geometric planes of subtly shifting colours, as well as its ready-made nature, Untitled broaches the fields of Minimalism, Pop and Colour-field painting. Part of the collection of Erik Mosel, the influential patron of Minimalist and Conceptual art whose revolutionary outlook redefined the international contemporary art scene from the 1960s onwards, Untitled encapsulates the brilliance of Palermo’s early practice. This is the period when friendships were born between Mosel and the artist for whom he fostered a collaborative environment and encouraged a back-and-forth free-flowing exchange of ideas. In this sense, Untitled embodies the stunning result of the regenerating dialogue between an emerging artist and an emerging collector, which was to define the growing international purview of Minimalist and Conceptualist thought and practice.
It was during the 1960s that Palermo, side by side with his fellow students Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke, formed part of a now legendary group of pioneering artists who actively extended the practice of painting into a new conceptual domain that embraced the habits and materials of everyday life. The extraordinary and quite unique works that Palermo made at this time form, to some extent, the basis of all of his later painterly explorations. Executed on a simple, roughly rectangular plank of wood, and laboriously painted and taped over with painter’s masking tape in a sequence of delicate colours, Untitled exudes a unique, tactile aura. A seemingly flat object that has evidently been laboriously crafted, touched and reworked, Untitled asserts itself on the wall as a singular, poetic and man-made anomaly which anticipates the later aesthetics of Arte Povera.
Strongly vertical and distinctly human-scaled, Untitled recalls the manifest ordinariness of the objects that artists such as Beuys and Nauman employed to create sculptural expressions of man’s interaction with the world around him, as stressed by Adrian Searle: ‘What he began to do with painting was closer in spirit to what Bruce Nauman was doing with sculpture. Both, essentially, were interested in human scale, the body as a measuring instrument, and our often absurd relations with the world we have made for ourselves’ (A. Searle, ‘Man of the Cloth’, in The Guardian, 1 April 2003). Drawing particular attention to its own material properties and the ways these have been activated through its making, its unusual, near-monochrome colour asserts a quiet yet powerful poetic sensibility. With its emphasis on the relationship between colour and surface, flatness and space, Untitled anticipates Palermo’s best known series of fabric paintings from the late 1960s-early 1970s called Stoffbilder, in which coloured textiles and materials were sewn together and attached to the stretcher in vertical or horizontal arrangements. The early appearance of tape in combination with paint –which will later on become one of the artist’s trademarks - is also telling of a radical experimentation which was taking shape in this same period and which will inform Palermo’s original contribution to contemporary art.
Executed in 1965, Untitled stems from Blinky Palermo’s groundbreaking series of Objects, sculptural paintings made from fragments, found objects, studio detritus and coloured tape that the artist made in Joseph Beuys’ class at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. In its idiosyncratic, near-geometric planes of subtly shifting colours, as well as its ready-made nature, Untitled broaches the fields of Minimalism, Pop and Colour-field painting. Part of the collection of Erik Mosel, the influential patron of Minimalist and Conceptual art whose revolutionary outlook redefined the international contemporary art scene from the 1960s onwards, Untitled encapsulates the brilliance of Palermo’s early practice. This is the period when friendships were born between Mosel and the artist for whom he fostered a collaborative environment and encouraged a back-and-forth free-flowing exchange of ideas. In this sense, Untitled embodies the stunning result of the regenerating dialogue between an emerging artist and an emerging collector, which was to define the growing international purview of Minimalist and Conceptualist thought and practice.
It was during the 1960s that Palermo, side by side with his fellow students Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke, formed part of a now legendary group of pioneering artists who actively extended the practice of painting into a new conceptual domain that embraced the habits and materials of everyday life. The extraordinary and quite unique works that Palermo made at this time form, to some extent, the basis of all of his later painterly explorations. Executed on a simple, roughly rectangular plank of wood, and laboriously painted and taped over with painter’s masking tape in a sequence of delicate colours, Untitled exudes a unique, tactile aura. A seemingly flat object that has evidently been laboriously crafted, touched and reworked, Untitled asserts itself on the wall as a singular, poetic and man-made anomaly which anticipates the later aesthetics of Arte Povera.
Strongly vertical and distinctly human-scaled, Untitled recalls the manifest ordinariness of the objects that artists such as Beuys and Nauman employed to create sculptural expressions of man’s interaction with the world around him, as stressed by Adrian Searle: ‘What he began to do with painting was closer in spirit to what Bruce Nauman was doing with sculpture. Both, essentially, were interested in human scale, the body as a measuring instrument, and our often absurd relations with the world we have made for ourselves’ (A. Searle, ‘Man of the Cloth’, in The Guardian, 1 April 2003). Drawing particular attention to its own material properties and the ways these have been activated through its making, its unusual, near-monochrome colour asserts a quiet yet powerful poetic sensibility. With its emphasis on the relationship between colour and surface, flatness and space, Untitled anticipates Palermo’s best known series of fabric paintings from the late 1960s-early 1970s called Stoffbilder, in which coloured textiles and materials were sewn together and attached to the stretcher in vertical or horizontal arrangements. The early appearance of tape in combination with paint –which will later on become one of the artist’s trademarks - is also telling of a radical experimentation which was taking shape in this same period and which will inform Palermo’s original contribution to contemporary art.