Curated by Fabrice Stroun
For Steven Parrino, the making of art in New York was—like life in the city itself—an unremitting, unsentimental negotiation between production and destruction. Taking as many cues from Warhol as he did from experimental music, this post-painter wrenched canvases off their stretchers, twisting them into glossy vortexes, and pummeled smooth Sheetrock panels with a sledgehammer. What’s most American in Parrino’s work are its automatic procedures, its blackouts, and its conceptual relationship with B-horror movies, underground comics, and noise. This retrospective includes more than two hundred works, ranging from paintings, drawings, and photographs that date from the artist’s student years and his involvement with the Nature Morte gallery in the East Village to the collaborative film and music projects that preceded his fatal motorcycle accident in 2005.
