Steven Parrino valuation
American painter of slashed, torn and bent monochromes pulled off their stretchers, whose art drew on punk and noise music.
Steven Parrino (1958–2005) was born in New York City and grew up on Long Island, in a family originally from Sicily.
What a work by Steven Parrino is worth
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Bio
Steven Parrino (1958–2005) was born in New York City and grew up on Long Island, in a family originally from Sicily. He took an associate degree at SUNY Farmingdale in 1979 and a BFA at Parsons in 1982, and he was also a noise musician associated with punk and post-punk. His best-known works are large monochrome paintings, in black or black and white, orange, red, blue or silver, which he slashed, tore or twisted off their stretchers. As early as 1981 he was detaching canvas from the stretcher to make folded, cleft surfaces, a literal deconstruction of painting, driven by what he called a necrophiliac interest in a medium then pronounced dead. He first showed these paintings at Nature Morte in the East Village in 1984. Bent paintings on honeycomb aluminium panels, slot paintings and works such as Crowbar (1987), a monochrome ripped around three edges with the crowbar resting on the stretcher, followed, and his work also takes in sculpture, collage, film, sound recordings, text and drawings. The Palais de Tokyo in Paris held the retrospective La Marque Noire, and the Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein a comprehensive exhibition.
His paintings are distorted by design, so a buyer will want to know which folds, tears and loose canvas are the artist's and which are later damage, and how a work has been stored and hung. Keep the title, date, any paperwork from the estate and the gallery invoice with it.
At a glance
- Born
- 1958, New York City
- Died
- 1 January 2005, Brooklyn
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