THE ORGANIZERS of the elegant Blinky Palermo retrospective at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf and the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen wasted no time in announcing their bold, materially focused agenda: At the entrance to the exhibition, visitors were greeted by a sequence of short videos featuring Palermo, whose own statements about abstraction introduced, in effect, the daring curatorial program within the galleries. In one segment, excerpted from a 1969 West German television broadcast, the young German artist declares to a group of Düsseldorf high school students: “When a square is