Whether it's through the relentless deformation, slashing, or radical destruction of his canvases, in performances with his Noise band, or in spontaneous actions like “Disruption” (1981), in which he smashed a television set with a sledgehammer, Steven Parrino consistently pushes the boundaries of his radical artistic expression.
Emerging from the New York avant-garde of the 1970s and 1980s, his work is imbued with the energies of punk rock, the No Wave movement, and the biker subculture, their raw acoustic intensity and visual codes shaping his practice and taking material form in the slashed, bent, and broken surfaces of his works. After graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the New School in New York in 1982, Parrino soon became a leading figure in post-conceptual painting. His consistent exploration of the material and structural conditions of the medium led to a fundamental reevaluation of painting. He combines subcultural influences with art-historical precision to create a complex dialog with post-war painting that defies any clear categorization. Following his first solo exhibition at the Nature Morte Gallery in New York in 1984, he was at times associated with the “Neo-Geo” movement. However, he viewed its critical reflection on the commercialization and mechanization of late modernism with skepticism. Instead, he developed his own distinctive practice that blends Minimalism and Pop Art—from Frank Stella and Barnett Newman to Andy Warhol—with the anarchic energy of punk rock. Parrino works through multiple media, including painting, video, drawing, installation, and performance. His works deconstruct painting in the literal sense: canvases are twisted, torn, or removed from their stretchers, becoming unstable objects that challenge and expand the conventions of the medium. The 1998 work offered here exemplifies this approach. Its title is as nihilistic as it is provocative, and its treatment of the canvas is radical. By deliberately removing sections of the monochromatic surface, Parrino destabilizes the picture plane and transforms the painting into a space where absence and presence are equally effective. Parrino died following a motorcycle accident in 2005. Just one year later, his work was included in the Whitney Biennial, thereby receiving posthumous recognition. International exhibitions, among others, at the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen (1998), the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo (2003), the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2015), and the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris (2022), attest to the lasting relevance of his work. Today, Parrino’s oeuvre is regarded as a singular, uncompromising contribution to painting that continues to challenge and redefine the medium. [KA]