Blinky Palermo: Editioned Works
March 11 - May 6, 1995


Brooke Alexander Editions is pleased to announce a retrospective of the complete graphic work by the late German artist Blinky Palermo (1943-1977).

Palermo's use of abstraction has consistently captured the attention of the American audience because the way he deploys this style seems counter, even heretical to the special place reserved for abstract art in this country. A student of Joseph Beuys, his appreciation of abstraction was more liberal-minded than most American abstract painters from the same period.

The earliest work in this exhibition is 4 Protoypen of 1970. In contrast to the prevailing notion of the abstract image as something utterly original and unmediated, Palermo offers four possible archetypes of authenticity. In the same year, he turns to the exploration of architecture through abstraction in works such as Treppenhaus, and a suite of twelve lithographs he completed for Heiner Friedrich's gallery in Munich. In these works he pictures abstraction as a style inquisitive about the philosophy of phenomenology. There are also later and more literal images such as Projection, 1971, and Telefon, 1971, a collaboration with Gerhard Richter. In Telefon, the bright yellow field surrounding the pedestrian picture of a telephone allows modern abstraction to frame modern convenience, both modes of communication, both a literal and direct as the other. Three years before his untimely death, Palermo produced Mappe zur Wandmalerei or Map for Wall Painting, in which abstraction is reconsidered as a blueprint that differes, or- in Palermo's eyes, cartoons its hackneyed capacity to convey expression in the first person. To say that Palermo's use of abstraction is fluid and undaunted by art history is an obvious understatement. It offers a lens with a wide angle that invites us to contemplate his culture, and insists that we re-consider our own.

The exhibition was co-organized by Jurgen Becker, Hamburg, and the generous cooperation of several German private collectors.