Blinky Palermo
Retrospective 1964–1977
June 25–October 31, 2011
www.diaart.org
www.bard.edu/ccs
Saturday, June 25, 2011, 11 am–6 pm
Events are open to the public.
Free round-trip transportation on a chartered bus is available from New York City to both locations.
For bus reservations, write ccs@bard.edu or call 845.758.7598
Dia:Beacon, Riggio Galleries
3 Beekman Street
Beacon, NY 12508
Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS Bard)
Bard College
Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504
Organized by Dia Art Foundation and the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard), and curated by Lynne Cooke, Blinky Palermo: Retrospective 1964–1977 introduces American audiences to the influential German artist Blinky Palermo (1943–1977). Including more than sixty works, most of which have never been shown in North America, this comprehensive retrospective provides a fresh and in-depth examination of the evolution of the artist’s aesthetic and illuminates the significance of his contributions to the field of postwar painting.
The first collaboration between the two largest museums in the Hudson Valley dedicated to art from the 1960s through the present, the exhibition will be shown both at Dia:Beacon and at CCS Bard. On view in the CCS Bard galleries will be the Objects, which Palermo created shortly after he graduated from Joseph Beuys’s class at the Düsseldorf Art Academy in 1964, as well as the Stoffbilder (Cloth Pictures), and documentation of his Wall Drawings and Paintings. The installation at Dia:Beacon will be devoted to Palermo’s Metal Pictures, dating from 1973 to 1977, which the artist developed while living in New York City.
This retrospective continues Dia’s longstanding commitment to Blinky Palermo. Dia founder Heiner Friedrich represented Palermo through his Munich gallery in the mid-1960s and presented his first solo exhibition in 1968. In 1987, Dia inaugurated its exhibition space in Chelsea with a major show of works by Palermo, alongside those of Beuys and Imi Knoebel. Until the current tour, Dia:Beacon housed the most significant Palermo installation in the United States, featuring To the People of New York City (1976), a monumental painting in fifteen parts, which is also a centerpiece of this exhibition. Marieluise Hessel, co-founder of CCS Bard, with encouragement by Friedrich, collected works by Palermo, several of which are included in this retrospective.
Publication
Blinky Palermo: Retrospective 1964–1977 is accompanied by a full-color, hardcover book, co-published by Dia and Yale University Press. Essays by distinguished authors, including Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Suzanne Hudson, Susanne Küper, James Lawrence, as well as curator Lynne Cooke, position the artist’s work in relation to postwar American art and culture, examine issues of space and time in the Wall Drawings and Paintings, and provide insights into Palermo’s works on paper. Preface by Dia Director Philippe Vergne and CCS Bard Director Tom Eccles. Extensive biography and bibliography. Available online at www.diabooks.org.
Public Programs
Lynne Cooke and Dia have invited four artists who have been inspired by Palermo’s work to give walkthroughs of the Dia:Beacon installation of the exhibition, exploring Palermo’s Metal Pictures and late works within the context of his artistic development. Talks are free with museum admission.
Saturday, July 9, 2011, 2 pm
Josiah McElheny
Sunday, July 24, 2011, 2 pm
David Reed
Sunday, September 25, 2011, 2 pm
Cheryl Donegan
Saturday, October 15, 2011, 2 pm
Liliana Porter
Hours
Dia:Beacon regular hours: Thursday–Monday 11am–6pm [closed Tuesday and Wednesday]
CCS Bard regular hours: Wednesday–Sunday 1–5 pm [closed Monday and Tuesday]
Funding
The national tour of Blinky Palermo: Retrospective: 1965–1977 is made possible by GUCCI. Additional tour support is provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Brown Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Glenstone. Funding for the publication is provided by Sotheby’s, the Marx Family Advised Fund at Aspen Community Foundation, and the Andrew J. and Christine C. Hall Foundation.
Blinky Palermo
Blinky Palermo was born Peter Schwarze in 1943 in Leipzig, where he and his twin brother, Michael, grew up as adopted children under the name Heisterkamp. In 1962 he entered the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where he studied with Joseph Beuys, and in 1964 he adopted the name Blinky Palermo, which he appropriated from an American boxing manager. During his lifetime, Palermo participated in more than seventy exhibitions and represented Germany at the 13th São Paulo Biennial (1975). Posthumous retrospectives have been presented at the Kunstmuseum Winterthur (1984); the Kunstmuseum Bonn (1993); Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, in co-production with the Serpentine Gallery, London (2002–2003); and the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf and Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf (2007).
Also on view at Dia:Beacon
Dia:Beacon is the home for Dia Art Foundation’s acclaimed collection of artworks from the 1960s to the present. In addition to major installations of work by artists including Joseph Beuys, Imi Knoebel, Sol LeWitt, Agnes Martin, Robert Ryman, and Richard Serra, among others, Dia:Beacon’s 2011 program includes the exhibition Franz Erhard Walther: Work as Action (ongoing), Ian Wilson: The Pure Awareness of the Absolute (beginning September 2011), and a performance series of the work of Yvonne Rainer (beginning October 2011). For more information on these and other programs, visit www.diaart.org.
Also on view at CCS Bard
If you lived here, you’d be home by now
June 25–December 16, 2011
Co-curated by New York-based artist, Josiah McElheny, Tom Eccles, and Lynne Cooke, the exhibition If you lived here, you’d be home by now is conceived as a complement to the Blinky Palermo: Retrospective 1964–1977 and includes a number of new site-specific works by Josiah McElheny that draw upon the legacy of this important German artist.
If you lived here, you’d be home by now also presents a number of works on loan from Marieluise Hessel’s private collection, including paintings and sculpture by Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, Agnes Martin, Louise Bourgeois, Carl Andre and Dan Flavin. New additions to the Hessel Collection housed at the Center for Curatorial Studies by Chantal Ackerman, RH Quaytman, Moyra Davie and Saul Fletcher highlight notions of intimacy and raise issues of privacy, obsession and how we experience both interior spaces and our inner lives. Many of these early acquisitions are on public view for the first time.
The exhibition is also an investigation of how an exhibition contextualizes objects within a given space, and how new meanings for those objects are produced by the vantage points from which we experience them. The exhibition is based on a series of inversions and infiltrations: from reversing the relationship of viewing art in a collector’s private home to activating and personalizing the sometimes passive viewing experience of a museum; from recreating a domestic and psychic interior within the museum space to staging an artistic collaboration through overtly inhabiting space and time within an exhibition. The Hessel Museum has in fact been reconfigured to mimic a domestic setting with galleries transformed into a series of rooms; a living room, bedroom, dining room, and library.
For more information, visit www.bard.edu/ccs.
