Oliver Morris-Jones
Specialist, Post War & Contemporary Art
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PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE SWISS COLLECTION
Lot 8AW
STEVEN PARRINO(1958-2005)Repulsion Painting N° 2
20 November 2024, 17:00 EST
New YorkUS$250,000 - US$350,000
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Contemporary Art (US)
Rachel Griffith
Sale Coordinator
STEVEN PARRINO (1958-2005)
Repulsion Painting N° 2
signed and dated 'ST Parrino 1992' (on the reverse); inscribed and dated '"Repulsion Painting" N°2 / 1992' (on the stretcher)
enamel on canvas
91 5/8 x 37 1/4 in (232.7 x 95.8 cm)
Executed in 1992
signed and dated 'ST Parrino 1992' (on the reverse); inscribed and dated '"Repulsion Painting" N°2 / 1992' (on the stretcher)
enamel on canvas
91 5/8 x 37 1/4 in (232.7 x 95.8 cm)
Executed in 1992
Footnotes
Provenance
MASSIMODECARLO, London, no. PAR-043.
Private collection, Switzerland.
Thence by descent to the present owner.
Exhibited
London, MASSIMODECARLO, New Wrinkles (After Judd): 1959-2010, September 4 - October 8, 2014.
An imposing thrum emanates from Steven Parrino's torqued paintings. Across their tensile surfaces, there is something undeniably human, their softness and non-conformity in direct conflict with their physicality and daring. Parrino's iconic "misshaped" canvases are complex interjections in the postmodern narrative that capture the spirit of the '80s and '90s, a period of political ferment and social divergence. They refigure the cosmic spaces of Lucio Fontana and Robert Smithson, upend the compositional uniformity of Ellsworth Kelly and Robert Ryman, and pulse with the arrhythmic soundscapes of No Wave and Punk. This unification of head and heart is at the core of what makes Repulsion Painting no. 2 such a visual triumph, a rare white enameled canvas by an artist who is one of the most collectible abstract painters of the postmodern period.
A New Yorker since birth, Parrino emerged from the cauldron of the 1980s Downtown scene, influenced by the hard aesthetics and nihilism of No Wave music and postmodern philosophy. From his earliest performance pieces, the lifeblood of Parrino's practice was anarchy and reconstruction. Underpinning his methodology was a rebuttal of aesthetic values that had, in the eyes of many, brought painting to a finality. Many artists confronted this critical stance head-on. Where a figurative revival was led by Neoexpressionists in New York and Germany including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Martin Kippenberger, and Julian Schnabel, an abstract limb that blended into Conceptual practice and The Pictures Generation developed in the work of Olivier Mosset, Christopher Wool, Rudolf Stingel, and Richard Prince. Into this milieu, Parrino emerged with striking force – a non-conformist who instantly caught the attention of collectors in the US and Europe.
The iconography of Pop, Hard-Edge Minimalism and anarchic subcultures fed Parrino's aesthetic vocabulary; the art historical trope of the monochrome taking on a social function, suddenly strikingly reminiscent of black leather biker jackets and glossy magazine fronts. In Parrino, the ideologies of hard Minimalist painting were indistinguishable from the enameled colors of motorcycle gas tanks and televisual advertising. Stripping, contorting and re-stretching his enameled monochromes, his process was as much a performance of demolition as creation. A kind of 'Frankenstein's Monster,' the tendrils of primer and remnants of staples remind us that we are looking at a former painting, now reanimated. In Repulsion Painting no. 2, we glimpse references as various as Rothko and Renaissance drapery, Warhol and Ed Wood. Serene in white and monumental in scale, towering over the spectator at nearly eight feet, it captures something of the twisted postmodern psyche that had failed to be made explicit until Parrino.
His life and career tragically cut short at age 46, killed on New Years Day 2005 riding his red Harley Davidson in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, Parrino has a mythic air as one of the great malefactors of contemporary painting. A true original in every sense, Repulsion Painting no. 2 comes from the core passage of Parrino's career as he deepened his European institutional credentials, exhibiting at Le Consortium, Dijon, and the Centraal Museum, Utrecht, that same year. Completely fresh to market, it represents an opportunity to acquire a rare painting by one of the most prescient and exhilarating artists of the late twentieth century, whose legacy and influence continues to be celebrated and amplified.
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