Steven Parrino

Steven Parrino (born 1958 in New York - † January 1, 2005 in Greenpoint , a borough of Brooklyn , New York) was an American contemporary painter , conceptual artist and noise musician .

Life

Steven Parrino grew up on Long Island . At the age of 13 he attended a Grateful Dead concert near him, where he was particularly impressed by the “hellish feedback ”. After further music experience (e.g. the first Ramones LP in 1976 ), he began to experiment in 1977 with two electric guitars that he rubbed against each other. In 1978 he discovered the no-wave subculture in music with its practiced minimalism . In future, this should be reflected in all of its artistic forms of expression. By his own admission, he became a distortion, denting and warping junkie.

Parrino acquired in 1979 at the State University of New York at Farmingdale university degree Associate of Applied Science and received the 1982 Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Parson's School of Design . He had his first exhibition in 1984 at the Nature Morte gallery in the East Village (Manhattan) . His public musical appearance, which he began in 1979 with feedback, then led him as a guitarist in several local bands and in 1997 he founded the noise project Electrophilia - initially alone, at most topped up by guests, then from 2002 together with the German artist Jutta Koether, who lives in New York, as Duo.

Steven Parrino was a passionate biker and wearer of leather jackets . He died in a motorcycle accident after attending a New Year's Eve party early in the morning on January 1, 2005. Alcohol was not involved, it was emphasized.

plant

As a visual artist, Parrino usually provided his canvases with a monochrome coat of paint in the colors red, orange, silver or black, then destroyed them so that the stripes or scraps were not flat, but layered, arched, crumpled or otherwise sculptured. This created a differentiated refraction and shading . The transformation of his pictures into reliefs corresponded to the spirit of Donald Judd , who criticized the rigid traditional requirement of rectangles pressed against the wall. Parrino himself called them "misshaped paintings" (roughly: "misshapen pictures"). Works made of other materials were also subject to a previous process of destruction. For example, Parrino applied black industrial paint to 13 plasterboard base plates and then smashed them. He named the 2001 object 13 Shattered Panels (for Joey Ramone ) . The relationship to Joey Ramone, the founder of the “wild” punk rock band Ramones, is one of the many to American underground culture . Parrino openly toied with the motorcycle culture of the Hells Angels , with the insignia of the occult , with underground comics and films, with the performance art of the 1970s and with the punk scene as well as experimental music - all provocations for the broad masses of the population.

In addition to painting, Parrino created environments , making-of films, bent metal sculptures that correspond to his “misshapen canvases”, as well as photographs of his desk with the newspaper clippings and music albums that had inspired him. Around 1984 Parrino was added to a branch of postmodernism called Neo-Geo. Peter Halley , Wallace & Donahue, Haim Steinbach , John Armleder and Olivier Mosset also belonged to this group of artists, who mixed modernist abstraction with a more cynical form of Pop Art worldliness by adding references to commerce, design, music or films . He wasn't happy with that assignment. Steven Parrino's work exerted influences on, for example, Cady Noland and Banks Violette.

In music, he first practiced the "guitar grind", that is, the rubbing of the strings of two electric guitars on each other to generate shrill feedback noises. From 1997 he expressed himself using electronic sound generating devices. The noise and performance artist Jutta Koether joined his project Electrophilia and together they created and combined psychedelic noise, alienated bass lines and synthesizer sound carpets. The result has been described as a mixture of the soundproofing of Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music , the improvisational screeching of instruments from Albert Ayler , Merzbow's extreme noise attacks and the dirty rawness of the Stooges .

Solo exhibitions (selection)

• 1984, 1987: Nature Morte Gallery, New York (1987 udT Holes and Slots )
• 1988, 1990, 1992, 1995, 2000, 2004, 2007: Massimo de Carlo Arte Contemporanea, Milan (2004 udT Tre and 2007 udT A Fair Show: Slang and Cool Orthodoxy in the gallery now called Galleria Massimo De Carlo)
• 1988, 1992: Galerie Sylvana Lorenz, Paris
• 1990, 1993, 1995, 2000, 2007: Galerie Rolf Ricke , Cologne (1995 udT De (Forming) ; 2007 in the gallery continued as Galerie Schmidt Maczollek)
• 1994: Win van der Abbeele Gallery, Antwerp
• 1995: Kees Van Gelder Gallery, Amsterdam
• 1995: Amphetamine Monster , Mill Art & Public, Geneva
• 1995: Misfits , Tre Gallery, Stockholm
• 1996: Kunsthaus Palais Thurn und Taxis Gärtnerhaus, Bregenz
• 1998: CAN, Center d'art Neuchâtel, Neuchâtel
• 1999: Elizabeth Cherry Gallery, Tucson, AZ
• 2001: Grazer Kunstverein , Graz
• 2002: Black Bonds , with Jutta Koether, Swiss Institute, New York
• 2002: Steven Parrino Videos 1979 – Present , Circuit, Lausanne
• 2003: Transnational Monster League , Derek Eller Gallery, New York
• 2003: We Love Painting - American Contemporary Art from the Misumi Collection , Museum of Contemporary Art , Tokyo
• 2004, 2009: Kunstmuseum St. Gallen , St. Gallen (2004 udT Global World - Private Universe , 2009 udT Born to be Wild - Hommage to Steven Parrino )
• 2005: The Painted World , PS1 Contemporary Art Center , Long Island City, NY
• 2005: What's New Pussycat? , Museum of Modern Art , Frankfurt am Main
• 2006: Cosmic Wonder , Yerba Buena Center for the Arts , San Francisco, CA
• 2006: Day for Night , Whitney Museum of American Art , New York ( Whitney Biennial 2006)
• 2006: Rétrospective 1977–2004 , Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain (MAMCO), Geneva
• 2007: La Marque Noire. Rétrospective , Palais de Tokyo , Paris
• 2007: Gagosian Gallery , New York

Discography

• 1998: Osculum Infame (7 "vinyl single, Villa Magica Records)
• 1999: Electrophilia: Live France 1999, A Clean and Healthy Obsession (Live-CD, ENSA Bourges)
• 2002: Shock Wave Troop (limited 10 "vinyl single, Editions Circuit)
• 2004: Black Noise Practitioner (double LP, Skul)
• 2005: Jutta Koether / Steven Parrino Untitled (live music cassette, tapesports)
• 2016: Electrophilia Vs. LSD 25 (album, Villa Magica Records)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Steven Parrino. In: discogs.com. Retrieved November 24, 2016 . 
2. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g} Roberta Smith: Steven Parrino, 46, an Artist and Musician in a Punk Mode, Dies. In: nytimes.com. January 3, 2005, accessed November 24, 2016 . 
3. ↑ Steven Parrino: The No Texts (1979-2003) . 1st edition. Abaton Book Company, Jersey City 2003, ISBN 0-9677326-5-4 , The Road to Electrophilia, pp. 31-32 .
4. ↑ ^{a b} Steven Parrino. Artist Biography. In: gagosian.com. Retrieved November 24, 2016 . 
5. ↑ ^{a b c} Electrophilia. In: fusetronsound.com. Retrieved November 24, 2016 . 
6. ↑ ^{a b} Antje Krause-Wahl: Steven Parrino. (PDF; 440 kB) Snake Lake, 1991 […] In: mmk-frankfurt.de. Pp. 1–3 , accessed November 24, 2016 . 
7. ↑ ^{a b c} Jerry Saltz: The Wild One. The late Steven Parrino was bent on destroying painting in order to save it. In: nymag.com. October 28, 2007, accessed November 24, 2016 . 
8. ↑ ^{a b} Konrad Bitterli: From the dark sides of art. On Steven Parrino's drawing basics . In: Konrad Bitterli, Roland Wäspe (Ed.): Global World. Private Universe . Kunstverein St. Gallen, Art Museum, February 14 - May 31, 2004. Verlag für moderne Kunst, Nuremberg 2004, ISBN 3-936711-23-2 , pp. 64 f .

literature

• Steven Parrino: The No Texts (1979-2003) . 1st edition. Abaton Book Company, Jersey City 2003, ISBN 0-9677326-5-4 .

tribute

• John Armleder , Amy Granat, Mai-Thu Perret (Eds.): Black Noise. A Series of Artist Boxes in the Comic Format Conceived in Tribute to the Late Steven Parrino . JRP Ringier , Zurich 2007, ISBN 978-3-905770-94-0 (box set, consisting of 32 individual albums).

Web links

• Steven Parrino at Discogs (English)
• Electrophilia at Discogs (English)