Blinky Palermo at the Hirshhorn

I found myself in DC this weekend and early Sunday morning found me at the Hirshhorn for the much-anticipated Palermo retrospective.

The timing of this travelling exhibit is just about right as many people are now directly or obliquely referencing Palermo – he is clearly one of the artists the current zeitgeist is looking at. To look at this show and to hope to find direct relations with new art may not be the hardest thing to do in places, but to look at his body of work and to see the openness that went through his work is quite another.

This quality, his “porosity” is what draws many to his work before the period of his living in New York – but in reality this is his strongest period. From the cloth images to the wall paintings and the rough hewn sculpture/paintings Palermo’s early work is a idea and subject rich outpouring of artwork created in such a short period of time (+/- 10 years).

That porosity would start to come to an end with his relocation to New York, as Palermo would start to produce a series of paintings that would be executed on aluminum panel, usually in a small series (most often groups of three and four). However to be fair about the end of the porosity in New York, it is unknown what the future would have held for Palermo as his early death in 1977 would dictate that future works would be very hard to produce.

Installed here is the painting series “To the People of New York City” considered the zenith of his New York body of work. This brutal and yet sophisticated artwork balances itself between both of these two approaches, it is an amazing body of work – my only complaint is that the install seems bit too open for my taste – I would have loved to have seen this just a bit tighter to see and feel some of the overlap between the images. In a way a slightly tighter hanging would let some visuals bleed over into the viewer just a bit, visually pulling the suite of images into a more connected state.

The images I was most interested in seeing was the Cloth “paintings” as these are more often found in Europe than the United States – primarily being due to the location of their origin and relative fragile-ness of the artworks. The cloth works seem to take the many approaches from post war painting and distill them in a way that is clean, open and yet slightly subversive. They are a great opening salvo to a career that was cut short.