The artist Art & Public, Geneva Private collection, Switzerland Pierre Huber, Geneva Skarstedt Gallery, New York Acquired from the above by the present owner

New York, Skarstedt Gallery, Steven Parrino: Paintings & Drawings, 1986-2003, May-July 2019, pp. 26-27 (illustrated in color).

- In the tennis world, no talent goes unnoticed. If you are great (and put in the effort) you will end up at the US Open no matter your background, your upbringing, your attitude, or your color. In the art world (where performance metrics are purely subjective), it’s a different story. Despite its touted inclusiveness, the art world has little tolerance for its own Nick Kyrgios’ and Andre Agassi’s. - Parrino was the ultimate art rebel—who had little respect for conventions, the system, and ultimately the medium itself (as his squashed paintings attest). - Parrino did not attempt to climb the New York social and curatorial ladder. Instead, he preferred to ride his motorbike and play music rather than please a crowd that had little taste for his “fuck you” attitude and underground aesthetic. Nonetheless, he generated a strong following amongst the art nerds in Europe (I was one of them), who saw in him a kind of art world incarnation of the Easy Rider anti-hero. - He was also the ultimate artist’s artist, with many of the big names of the ‘80s and ‘90s recognizing his talent. Very sadly, Parrino died of a motorbiking accident in Brooklyn at the age of 47 in 2005, and never made it to the US Open. - I may be naive, but I do believe that once people get tired of chasing interchangeable works by “flavor of the day” artists, they will realize that grand masters (like Parrino) are hiding in plain sight. This is one of his best works ever, but I don’t want to promote it too much… I’ll let you judge with your own eyes and heart.

"Radicality comes from context and not necessarily form. The forms are radical in memory, by way of continuing the once radical, through extensions of its history. The avant-garde leaves a wake and, through mannerist force, continues forward. Even on the run, we sometimes look over our shoulders, approaching art with intuition rather than strategy. Art of this kind is more cult than culture.” --Steven Parrino Seeking to reinvigorate painting during an era where many artists and critics were anticipating its demise, Screw Ball is among Steven Parrino’s most recognizable formats. Seething with energy, Parrino’s “misshaped canvases” combine a sleek monochromaticism with the physicality of destruction—colliding Minimalism with Abstract Expressionism. Merging Parrino’s distinctly punk counterculture mentality with astute formalism, the “misshaped canvases” were executed at the peak of the artist’s influential, yet relatively short, career. Here, what was once a large yellow canvas has been transformed through Parrino’s own brutal intervention into a dwindling, yet voluptuous mass of surface and form. Divided into two distinct sections, Screw Ball reveals the total physicality of painting, where baroque yellow drapes are juxtaposed by the manipulated outer edges that revealing what lies beyond the stretcher bar—a strip of white primer and the artist’s unprimed canvas—only a few drips of yellow trickling down the paintings natural expanse divulge the artist’s process. The effect is both lush and nihilistic, sharp and coolly serious. By breaking up and violating the very medium of painting, Parrino delves into an extensive modernist linearity of negating pictorial illusionism, non-flat abstraction, and emotional domain painting often occupies. Returning to the core of artistic media over half a century after Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square promoted the end of painting and several decades after Frank Stella questioned the shape of the support itself, Parrino proceeded to examine the very essence of abstraction. Whereas Stella worked on the flatness of the surface alone, Parrino completely uproots it, propelling the exteriority of painting into a three-dimensional, atmosphere-shattering character, so that neither painting nor sculpture is securely defined. This destructive approach was infamously summarized by Parrino in one of his ‘NO’ texts. “When I started making paintings,” Parrino roared, “the word on painting was PAINTING IS DEAD. I saw this as an interesting place for painting … death can be refreshing, so I started engaging in necrophilia … approaching history in the same way that Dr. Frankenstein approaches body parts” (S. Parrino, The No Texts, New Jersey, 2003, p. 43). This macabre attitude reflects an artist engrossed in ‘post-punk existentialism’, and is visually reflected in works such as the present lot, which distill Parrino’s distinctly aggressive intervention, so that his rapid performative action is captured and suspended in time and form (ibid.).