Manhattan was the last painting that Blinky Palermo completed during his tragically curtailed career. With its exacting visual economy and pared-down monochromatic fields, the present work epitomizes the artist’s defining individual aesthetic, which bridged the gap between the semantic codes of Abstract Expressionism on the one hand and the reductive processes of nascent Minimalism on the other. Manhattan emblematises the city in which these two schools of art were born, and formally synthesises the tenets of each style. This work is part of Palermo’s Metallbilder series, developed whilst the artist was in New York between 1973 and 1976; it is closely related to Palermo’s magnum opus – To the People of New York City – which consists of 40 painted metal panels and is now held in the permanent collects ion of the Dia Art Foundation in New York.

As a student at the Dusseldorf Kunstakademie in the early sixties, Palermo was a close friend of Gerhard Richter, Konrad Lueg and Sigmar Polke, with whom he shared studios. Together, they were at the centre of a burgeoning art scene marked by cultural awakening and revolution. In Dusseldorf, there was a critical opposition to classical forms of art, thanks in large part to the teachings of Joseph Beuys, who so cataclysmically broke down barriers between material, form, content and action; the timbre was characterised by the disruptive influence of the Fluxus movement, Performance art, and emerging Pop. As one of the original Beuysritter, or Knights of Beuys, Palermo’s move into Beuys’ class in 1964 was attended by a shift in his approach to the medium of painting. While his earlier work had tended towards figurative painting, under Beuys he became increasingly interested in the organised spatial relationship between form and colour, a polarity which is manifest throughout the rest of his oeuvre, and obvious in the present work.

The construction of this painting lends it a sense of syncopation; fields of unmodulated orange, black, and teal are punctuated with thin stripes of white: three fields of colour are here arranged across two panels of steel. Palermo was inspired by jazz music during his t.mes in New York, and its influence is apparent here – as it is in To the People of New York, where a limited palette of red, yellow, and black is deployed in different geometric patterns across 40 panels so as to imply rhythm – jarred and off-beat.

Palermo was also influenced by New York’s visual artists; elements of the present work seem obvious riffs on Barnett Newman and Ellsworth Kelly – his predecessors in the interrogation of colour and form. Indeed, Manhattan exemplifies the manner in which the artist adopted the legacies of Newman and Kelly and subverted them to his own ends: “Palermo’s ultimate achievement may be said to be his liberation of form and colour from subordination to a greater, authorially arranged, compositional whole or from association with representational imagery. In every phase of his career, he proposed alternative methods by which, in effect, to redraw the line between real and painted space” (A. Rorimer, ‘Blinky Palermo: Objects, Stoffbilder, Wall Paintings’ in: Exh. Cat., Barcelona, Museo d’Art Contemporani (and travelling), Blinky Palermo, 2002, p. 51).