Lot 15: BLINKY PALERMO

BLINKY PALERMO 1943 - 1977 OHNE TITEL (UNTITLED) signed and dated 67 on the stretcher cotton and satin 200 by 200cm. 78 3/4 by 78 3/4 in.

Dusseldorf, Galerie Konrad Fischer, Blinky Palermo. Bilder, 1968
Nürnberg, Künstlerhaus, Deutscher Künstlerbund: 16. Ausstellung Nürnberg, 1968
Munich, Galerie-Verein München, Blinky Palermo 1964–1976, 1980, p. 80, illustrated in colour and pp. 46, 94 and 157, illustrated in colour in installation

Exhibition Catalogue, Krefeld, Museum Haus Lange, Palermo: Stoffbilder 1966-1972, 1977-78, no. 2
Thordis Moeller, Ed., Exhibition Catalogue, Bonn, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Palermo. Bilder und Objekte, 1994-95. Werkverzeichnis Band I, 1995, n. p., no. 55, illustrated in colour
Exhibition Catalogue, Los Angeles, County Museum of Art; Washington D. C., Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; New York, Dia: Beacon and CCS Bard, Blinky Palermo: Retrospective 1964–1977, 2010-11, p. 16, illustrated in colour in installation
Exhibition Catalogue, Barcelona, Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona; Kleve, Museum Kurhaus Kleve, With a Probability of Being Seen. Dorothee and Konrad Fischer: Archives of an Attitude, 2010-11, p. 125, illustrated in colour in installation

Galerie Konrad Fischer, Dusseldorf
Galerie Heiner Friedrich, Munich
Sabine Knust, Munich
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

"Palermo's ultimate achievement may be said to be his liberation of form and colour from association with representational imagery."
Anne Rorimer, 'Blinky Palermo: Objects, Stoffbilder, Wall Paintings' in: Exhibition Catalogue, Barcelona, Museo d'Art Contemporani; London, Serpentine Gallery, Blinky Palermo, 2002-03, p. 51

Absorbing the viewer entirely in a monumental, perfectly square sea of brilliant colour, Blinky Palermo's Ohne Titel of 1967 is the stunning archetype of his 'Stoffbilder', or 'cloth pictures', corpus and, as such, is the artist's most significant work ever to be offered at auction. With its exacting economy of visual resource and pared-down duality of chromatic fields, the present work epitomises Palermo's defining individual aesthetic, which bridged the gap between the semantic codes of Abstract Expressionism on the one hand and the reductive processes of nascent Minimalism on the other. Joined together along a horizontal sewn seam, two swathes of found material comprise juxtaposition between competing shades of red and a contrast between two fabrics of entirely different qualities. While the soft, fibrous cotton of the upper strip absorbs light and emanates a deep, consistent hue, the silken satin of the lower area continually reflects luminosity and emits an ever-adjusting lighter tone. These relationships exemplify Benjamin Buchloh's recent observation that "The cloth pictures are very much based on chords, on relations, nuances, and depths of some kind" (Exhibition Catalogue, Dusseldorf, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf and Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Palermo, 2007-08, p. 161). In a brief career, barely more than a decade long and cut tragically short, Palermo produced an oeuvre of groundbreaking significance, within which this Stoffbild Ohne Titel is truly exceptional.

As a student at the Dusseldorf Kunstakademie in the early sixties, Palermo was a close friend of Gerhard Richter, Konrad Lueg and Sigmar Polke, with whom he shared studios. Together, they were at the centre of a nascent art scene marked by awakening and revolution. In Dusseldorf, there was a critical opposition to classic forms of art, thanks in a large part to the teachings of Joseph Beuys, who so cataclysmically broke down barriers between material, form, content and actions; the timbre was characterized by the disruptive influence of the Fluxus movement, Performance Art and burgeoning Pop. As one of the original Beuysritter, or Knights of Beuys, Palermo's move into Beuys' class in 1964 was attended by a shift in his approach to the medium of painting. While his earlier work had tended towards figure painting, under Beuys he became increasingly interested in the organized spatial relationship between form and colour, a polarity which is manifest throughout the rest of his oeuvre.

In his inimitable, reductive manner, Palermo started to make paintings from sewn-together fields of unadulterated, ready-made fabrics of differing colours. Reduced to its purest form, it is in these works, the Stoffbilder, in which Palermo's philosophy achieves its most successful expression. Whereas Richter's first seemingly abstract 'Farbtafel' paintings initially depicted actual colour swatches and were thereby a form of representational painting, Palermo's Stoffbilder epitomise the pure essence of abstraction. In formal terms, the contrast here between the bands of bold red cotton and subtly iridescent red satin generates a visual effect of space, while also of course exemplifying immersion in colour. To achieve this subtlety and nuance with commercially available cloth, without so much as a gesture of a brush mark, both signals a challenge to the lofty ideals of Modernism and the idea that abstraction must be rarefied and isolated from everyday experience. While Richter and Polke were proposing a similarly materialist concept of art initially through their Pop idiom, Palermo's output, crystallised in this magnificent example, quietly revolutionised perception of relationships between colour and object and form.