RE:CIRCULATION 005 — Suzan Frecon and Blinky Palermo

SUZAN FRECON — Paintings, Richter Verlag, Düsseldorf, 1999

 

New York, 1974–1976.

In 1999, Richter Verlag published a small hardcover book of paintings by Suzan Frecon. Christa Häusler, a Munich gallerist, edited it. John Yau wrote the essay. Inside: stepped, hard-edged compositions in blue, dark green, deep red and gold leaf, each plate set alone on an otherwise empty page.

By 1999, Yau had been looking at Frecon’s work for twenty-four years. The institutions had not.

That’s not incidental timing. It’s the whole position this book occupies — not early enough to belong to an undiscovered artist, not late enough to belong to a settled account. It sits in the gap.

The gap leads backward.

Blinky Palermo arrived in New York in 1973 and moved into 141 Wooster Street — the SoHo building that housed Heiner Friedrich’s gallery, the dealer who’d discovered him in Munich in the mid-1960s and would go on, in 1974, to co-found the Dia Art Foundation around exactly this generation of artists. Palermo lived and worked inside Friedrich’s own building. Dia co-founder Helen Winkler Fosdick later recalled sitting with him at those windows, looking out at a fuel depot across the street painted the same dark green as one of his paintings. He stayed until spring 1976, working toward the aluminum panel paintings that culminated that year in To the People of New York City. He died the following February, in the Maldives, at thirty-three.

Suzan Frecon took a raw loft on Thomas Street a year later, in 1974. Its arched windows and southern light became, in her words, integrated into her work “little by little” — light she still insists on for how the paintings are shown. She had no commercial gallery. John Yau, who’d arrived in New York himself in 1975, found her work that year anyway, and kept looking.

For roughly two years, then, two painters were working blocks apart in the same city. I have found no sustained account that places them together.

That isn’t the interesting part, or shouldn’t be. What’s interesting is what happened to the two of them afterward — not to the paintings, to the records.

Palermo’s closed almost immediately. Beuys’s student, Friedrich’s discovery, part of the circle around Dia’s founding, dead at thirty-three before any of it could be revised. A short life is easy to catalogue in full; nothing more was going to happen to complicate it. Museums absorbed him early and completely.

Frecon’s stayed open for decades, because no single structure had claimed it. She showed at Jack Tilton in 1984, C-Space in 1987, Julian Pretto in 1988 — real exhibitions, on no institutional timetable leading anywhere in particular. It wasn’t until 2008, thirty-four years after Thomas Street, that the Menil Collection produced what its own literature calls “the first major exploration” of her work. David Zwirner began representing her that same year.

The 1999 book sits inside that thirty-four-year gap, close to its middle. Twenty-five years after Thomas Street. Nine years before the Menil. A record made by someone who’d been paying attention the whole time, arriving with no institutional consensus behind it yet.

The Whitney included her in its Biennial the following year. Yau kept going too — The Brooklyn Rail in 2005, Hyperallergic in 2017, the essay for her David Zwirner monograph in 2020, twenty-one years after this one. In 2022, Karma’s Painting in New York: 1971–83 placed her back among thirty women painters working in the city during exactly these years — an exhibition built around the fact that the received account of that period had left most of them out.

Their names appeared on the same calendar once more in 2015: Frecon’s oil paintings and sun on West 19th Street, Palermo: Works 1973–1976 a block away on West 20th, running concurrent for about a month. Whether David Zwirner intended any dialogue between them, or the overlap was simply how that month’s programming fell, isn’t something I’ve found written down either way.

One of these histories was already finished by 1999. The other was still being assembled, one small book at a time.

The work is about to change. The institutions are about to arrive. Yau is already there.