Steven Parrino
| Steven Parrino | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1958 New York City, New York, U.S. |
| Died | January 1, 2005 (aged 46–47) Greenpoint, New York, U.S. |
| Nationality | American |
| Education | Parsons |
| Known for | Artist, Painter, Noise Musician |
| Movement | Postmodern, East Village |
Steven Parrino (1958 – 2005) was an American artist and musician associated with energetic punk nihilism. He is best known for creating big modernist monochrome paintings (his colors were limited to monochrome black (or black-and-white), orange, red, blue, and silver) that he violently slashed, torn or twisted off their stretchers. He died in a motorcycle traffic accident in Greenpoint, Brooklyn at the age of 46.
Parrino was born in New York City in 1958 and grew up on Long Island. The family was Albanian-Arbëreshë originally from Sicily. He earned an associate of applied science degree from SUNY Farmingdale, in 1979 and a bachelor of fine arts degree from Parsons The New School for Design in 1982.
Parrino began producing art at the end of the 1970s, driven, as he said himself, by his ‘necrophiliac interest’ in painting, which at that time had been pronounced dead. As early as 1981 he detached the canvas from the stretcher in places to create rough, folded, cleft surfaces, thus achieving a literal deconstruction of painting.
Parrino first showed his paintings of deep-seated pessimism at Gallery Nature Morte, an East Village gallery, in 1984, when he emerged as part of a strain of postmodernism called Neo-Geo. Neo-Geo artists, including Peter Halley, Haim Steinbach, John Armleder and Olivier Mosset, mixed modernist abstraction with a more cynical form of Pop Art worldliness by adding references to commerce, design, music or the movies. Parrino called his mauled canvases “misshaped paintings,” in response to the shaped paintings of the sixties.
In addition to painting, Parrino exhibited painted environments that involved monochrome walls pounded with sledgehammers such as the 13 plaster panels painted black and smashed to pieces as a memorial to the Punk legend Joey Ramone called 13 Shattered Panels for Joey Ramone (2001). He also made films of the making of these environments along with sleek metal sculptures whose bent and folded elements related to his misshaped canvases. He also exhibited photographs of his desktop strewn with the newspaper stories, magazine spreads and music albums that often inspired him. Parrino used intentionally provocative subjects like abstract swastikas, rebel flags, and silhouettes of Russ Meyer starlets, Elvis Presley as rendered by Andy Warhol, the Hells Angels, Johnny Cash, and other works by Andy Warhol. His work has been called "mannered, Romantic, formulaic, conceptualist-formalist heavy-metal boy-art abstraction" by the art critic Jerry Saltz.
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