Steven Parrino

Through his synthesis of the work of earlier artists, his radical innovations in painting, and his collaborative work with his contemporaries, Steven Parrino has become one of the most influential artists to emerge in the 1980s. Several contemporaries describe Parrino’s work as “destroying painting in order to save it.” Parrino emerged in the art world during the 1980s, as figuration and mass media imagery were gaining prominence. Although Parrino did work with such imagery at times (especially his punk rock drawings), he is best known for his monochromatic paintings. Stretched, broken, cut, twisted, or otherwise misshapen paintings in silver or black (sometimes in other colors), the works take cues from artists such as Lucio Fontana and Frank Stella, but go far beyond. They look abused, flaunting the medium’s flatness by mauling the surface, pushing it into new haptic dimensions. Parrino’s work is both coolly minimal and Romantically, noisily maximal.

Although Parrino is considered something of an “artist’s artist” in the United States, he was well received in Europe during his lifetime, particularly in France and Germany. He was included in the 2006 Whitney Biennial and, in 2007, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris held a career retrospective of his work.