The ballad of Blinky Palermo: he was a student of Joseph Beuys, an early cohort of Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter, and by 1977 a casualty of hard living. Yet in 13 short years Blinky Palermo created a body of work not just indelibly his own but also, strikingly, still fresh today

Art in America, June-July, 2005 by Brooks Adams

Blinky Palermo's eternally young, loose-limbed production has been on many people's minds for the past few seasons. What with the recent revival of painting; the extended parameters of the medium as practiced by many artists, both established and emerging; and the continuing fascination with the more archeological aspects of 1960s and '70s German art activity, his work looks fresher than ever. Palermo's ethereal yet robustly painted early-to-mid-'60s canvases (both on and off the stretcher), with their intuitively placed squares, stripes and rectangles, and his eccentrically shaped and color-taped objects leaning against a wall or flying high, salon-style, near a cornice still pack a punch. In addition, his coolly reductivist, striped paintings made of sewn-together lengths of readymade fabric, not to mention his low-key architectonic projects for site-specific wall paintings and drawings, all fit squarely in the forefront of what was adventurous then and what remains so now.

A recent European retrospective of Palermo's work, together with an imposing installation at Dia:Beacon of one of the artist's last works, To the People of New York City (1976-77), served to crack open the Palermo archives anew, and suggested how many filiations his work has with other art of its time, as well as with emerging developments in 21st-century painting.

At Dia:Beacon, Palermo's work hangs near that of his teacher, Joseph Beuys, as well as his peers, notably Gerhard Richter and Imi Knoebel, members of an original group that helped form the Dia esthetic as it incubated in the late '60s and early '70s. Palermo was one of the original "Beuysritteren," or knights of Beuys (a term used contemporaneously by another Beuys student, Jorg Immendorff, whose unabashedly figurative work is notably not on view at Dia), and something of the exalted mood in and around Beuys's class at the Dusseldorf Kunstakademie still clings to that designation. Many of Palermo's signal, early site-specific installations (beginning in 1968) were heraldic wall drawings created for Heiner Friedrich's gallery in Munich. (Friedrich would later marry Philippa de Menil, and together they would form the Lone Star Foundation, from which the Dia Art Foundation derives.)

Palermo's To the People of New York City, currently on view in Beacon, is a late work. (Born in 1943, the artist died in 1977 at the age of 33). It's a 15-part cycle comprising 40 paintings, which bespeaks something of the largesse of the artist's mature production. Archival color photographs of the cycle, taken by Knoebel, are reproduced in the catalogue of the 1985 Palermo retrospective at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. They document the work as it hung in the artist's Dusseldorf studio the morning after he died of heart failure on Feb. 17, 1977, on Kurumba Island, during a trip to the Maldives. Posthumously shown at Friedrich's gallery in SoHo in May-June 1977, To the People of New York City is not quite a site-specific work, although it may well have been made with Friedrich's large space in mind. I remember seeing this New York show at a time when my perception of the event was still affected by news of the artist's recent death. This timing probably made the show even more important for younger painters of the era. In 1981, for example, Julian Schnabel named a painting The Unexpected Death of Blinky Palermo in the Tropics.

In Beacon, one big squarish space is devoted to this bravura painting cycle, which exhibits all different weights and densities of red, yellow and black stripes, squares and rectangles variously inflecting small and medium-size panels of aluminum. Mounted slightly away from the bright white walls in Dia's magnificent skylit spaces, the metal paintings take on a quality of heightened crispness: it's like viewing road signs from afar. (Indeed, the series may reflect the artist's 1974 road trip with Knoebel across America, where among other things they visited the newly opened Rothko Chapel in Houston and a Walter de Maria land piece near Las Vegas.) The intensity of the daylight and the sheer breadth of the Dia:Beacon wall spaces further accentuate the handmade quality of the paintings. Their low relief, rich brushed color, ruled and penciled edges, paint glops and impasto passages inflect the sense of measure, so that the overall exquisiteness of touch pushes the cool and clean sensation of the low-relief formats into some heightened sense of actuality.

A smaller galley at Beacon is devoted to Palermo's Times of Day I (1974-75) and Times of Day II (1975). These are more contained and variously colored series of four small metal paintings each. In both quartets, the subtle shifts in composition and coloration occur within a repeating, reductivist composition of standardized top and bottom horizontal stripes bracketing square fields of identical size. Palermo's alternating pale greens, blues and oranges really pop at Beacon. Overall, the effect of the three series is ebullient, unfolding and generous. Who was this artist? we ask ourselves again. Surely his work is more than a footnote--it seems central to the Dia esthetic--and why don't we know more about him?