Steven Parrino was an American artist and musician associated with energetic punk nihilism.
14 Facts About Steven Parrino
1.
2.
Steven Parrino is best known for creating big modernist monochrome paintings that he violently slashed, torn or twisted off their stretchers.
3.
Steven Parrino died in a motorcycle traffic accident in Greenpoint, Brooklyn at the age of 46.
4.
Steven Parrino earned an associate of applied science degree from SUNY Farmingdale in 1979 and a bachelor of fine arts degree from Parsons The New School for Design in 1982.
5.
Steven Parrino began producing art at the end of the 1970s.
6.
Steven Parrino was driven, as he said himself, by his 'necrophiliac interest' in painting, which at that time had been pronounced dead.
7.
Steven Parrino first showed his paintings of deep-seated pessimism at Gallery Nature Morte, an East Village gallery, in 1984, when he emerged as part of a strain of postmodernism called Neo-Geo post-conceptual art.
8.
Steven Parrino made films of the making of these environments along with sleek metal sculptures whose bent and folded elements related to his misshaped canvases.
9.
Steven Parrino exhibited photographs of his desktop strewn with the newspaper stories, magazine spreads and music albums that often inspired him.
10.
Steven Parrino used intentionally provocative subjects like abstract swastikas, rebel flags, and silhouettes of Russ Meyer starlets, Elvis Presley as rendered by Andy Warhol, the Hells Angels, Johnny Cash, and other works by Andy Warhol.
11.
Steven Parrino's work has been called "mannered, Romantic, formulaic, conceptualist-formalist heavy-metal boy-art abstraction" by the art critic Jerry Saltz.
12.
Steven Parrino played electric guitar in several downtown bands, most recently Electrophilia, a two-person group he formed with the painter and keyboardist Jutta Koether.
13.
Until his death, Steven Parrino's work had drawn little attention in the United States.
14.
Steven Parrino had nine solo shows in New York City and showed widely in galleries and museum in Europe, where his work was more widely appreciated than in the United States.