Blinky Palermo's Wall drawings & Wall Paintings: Line, Colour and Consciousness

^Blinky Palermo, Wandmalerei im großen Saal der Kunsthalle, Kunsthalle Baden-Baden,

1970. Photograph Erika Fischer

Exclusively for Saturated Space, Mark Pimlott explores the subtle spatial ambiguities of Blinky Palermo's Wall works.

"This essay describes wall drawings and paintings made by German artist Blinky Palermo (born Peter Schwarze 1943 Leipzig-died 1977 Maldives). These works, no longer in existence, were bound to their architectural conditions, in art galleries, museums, temporary spaces for art or people’s homes. The form of these works varied from line drawings tracing architectural features to fields and figures of colour painted directly on walls that made viewers aware of the specific characteristics of envrionments, altering viewers' reading of them. The works were made within a practice of painting, and embedded within a phenomenological approach: their engagements with their settings activated those settings and their viewers’ relations to them. Although much has been made of Joseph Beuys’s influence on Palermo (he was a student of Beuys at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 1963-1967), his work proposed a different role for art in society than Beuys: Palermo's work established his concerned with the viewer’s place in the world and accentuated consciousness as a vehicle for engagement therein."