Steven Parrino

I came to painting at the time of its death, not to breathe its last breath, but to caress its lifelessness.
—Steven Parrino

Gagosian is pleased to present a survey of works by Steven Parrino (1958–2005), an influential American artist with close ties to Switzerland. The exhibition features manipulated canvas paintings, works in sprayed enamel on vellum, and other works on paper. This is Parrino’s first solo exhibition with Gagosian since 2007, and his first at the gallery in Basel.

Blending an elegant formal aesthetic with an aggressive punk approach, Parrino slashed, crushed, and twisted his paintings’ supports, transforming them into “misshaped” sculptural monochromes. A pioneer in video art and spontaneous performance, he approached all his work in a radical spirit informed by the history of the avant-garde; he also undergirded his art’s direct physicality with references to occult and underground currents in American culture, from the Hell’s Angels to No Wave. Initially grouped with the Neo-Geo and Appropriation artists of 1980s downtown New York, Parrino was inspired by materially destructive strands in Arte Povera and Minimalism—as well as by the crushed steel sculptures of John Chamberlain and the muscle-car Hoods of Richard Prince—to reconfigure and recontextualize elements of pop iconography.

The works in the exhibition span Parrino’s brief but incendiary career, which was brought to an untimely end by his death in a motorcycle accident at the age of 46. In Disruption (1981), International Style (1983), and Seduction (1984), he pairs monochrome acrylic paintings on torn or crumpled canvases with framed photographs and Xerox prints, reproducing such confrontational images as a 1928 shot of Ruth Snyder, the first woman to be photographed in the electric chair, and actress Anna Karina posing with a handgun on the set of Jean-Luc Godard’s Made in U.S.A. (1966).