Blinky Palermo valuation
Took the name of an American boxing promoter, sewed pictures out of shop-bought cloth, and died at thirty-three.
What a work by Blinky Palermo is worth
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
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Bio
Blinky Palermo was born Peter Schwarze in Leipzig in 1943 and raised as Peter Heisterkamp after adoption. At the Düsseldorf academy he studied under Joseph Beuys alongside Richter, Polke and Knoebel, and acquired from a fellow student the nickname of Frank ‘Blinky’ Palermo, an American boxing promoter he was said to resemble. The work is small in quantity and various in kind: the Stoffbilder, made by buying lengths of commercial fabric, cutting them into bands and sewing them together over a stretcher so that no colour is ever mixed or applied; painted objects; drawings; wall drawings and wall paintings made for one particular room; and finally the metal pictures, among them To the People of New York City. He died on holiday in the Maldives in 1977, aged thirty-three, of causes never satisfactorily established.
A career of little more than a decade means supply is finite and the paperwork usually deep, with provenance running back through a small circle of German galleries and collectors. The cloth pictures are the signature body and their weakness is plain: dyed commercial fabric fades in light and stains permanently, and neither can be put right afterwards. Works on paper, prints and multiples make up the accessible end. The wall works cannot be owned as objects at all — what changes hands is the certificate and the instruction for making them.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
