Steven Parrino, 46, an Artist And Musician in a Punk Mode

[mar...@myrealbox.com]

January 3, 2005
Steven Parrino, 46, an Artist And Musician in a Punk Mode,
Dies
By ROBERTA SMITH NY Times

http://www.teamgal.com/parrino/index2.html

http://www.grazerkunstverein.org/im/2001_parrino_aa_02_m.jpg

http://www.themelvins.net/pics/artexhibition/pages/parrino_jpg.htm

http://www.teamgal.com/parrino/press_release04.html

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1248/is_9_89/ai_78334715

http://www.teamgal.com/parrino/bio.html

Steven Parrino, an artist and musician who imbued abstract
work in several mediums with a relentless if oddly energetic
punk nihilism, died early Saturday morning in a traffic
accident near his home in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. He was 46.

Mr. Parrino was returning from a New Year's Eve party in
Williamsburg when he apparently lost control of his
motorcycle and was thrown to the pavement. According to a
police report, he was pronounced dead at Bellevue Hospital
in Manhattan at 2:25 a.m. on Saturday.

Mr. Parrino was born in New York City in 1958 and grew up on
Long Island. He earned an associate of applied science
degree from SUNY, Farmingdale, in 1979 and a bachelor of
fine arts degree from Parsons in 1982.

While in art school he began making the work for which he is
best known: big modernist monochrome paintings, mostly black
ones, that had been violently slashed, torn or twisted off
their stretchers. He called these sculptural,
performance-oriented works "misshaped paintings" in response
to the shaped paintings that had preoccupied abstract
painters in the early 1960's.

Mr. Parrino first showed his paintings at Nature Morte, an
East Village gallery, in 1984, emerging as part of a strain
of postmodernism called Neo-Geo. Neo-Geo artists, who
included Peter Halley, Wallace & Donahue, 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.

In addition to painting, Mr. Parrino exhibited painted
environments that involved monochrome walls pounded with
sledgehammers; films of the making of these environments;
sleek metal sculptures whose bent and folded elements
related to his misshaped canvases; and photographs of his
desktop strewn with the newspaper stories, magazine spreads
and music albums that often inspired him. He also played
electric guitar in several downtown bands, most recently
Electrophilia, a two-person group he formed with the painter
and keyboardist Jutta Koether.

He had nine solo shows in New York, the last four at the
Team Gallery in Chelsea and showed widely in galleries and
museum in Europe, where his work was more widely appreciated
than in the United States. A retrospective of his work will
open at the Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain in Geneva in
2006. But his influence was visible in New York in the early
90's work of Cady Noland and more recently the black-hued,
rock 'n' roll-centered sculptural installations of Banks
Violette.

Mr. Parrino is survived by his father, Jerry, of Hicksville,
N.Y., and his brother, Robert, of Manorville, N.Y.