Artwork
Untitled
Untitled is a graphite drawing by Steven Parrino. It dates from 1990 and is held in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art.
About this work
Overview
Created in 1990, this work by Steven Parrino combines a gelatin-silver photograph with synthetic polymer paint and pencil. It belongs to a body of work that challenges traditional boundaries between photography and painting. The piece integrates found imagery with manual intervention, reflecting Parrino’s interest in disrupting conventional artistic formats through physical and visual disruption.
Subject & Meaning
The underlying photograph depicts a blurred boxing match, with two magnified circles isolating a fighter’s face and a section of the ring.
The underlying photograph depicts a blurred boxing match, with two magnified circles isolating a fighter’s face and a section of the ring. These focal points contrast with the surrounding indistinct crowd and ropes, suggesting a tension between clarity and chaos. The painted overprints—rough strokes and dense dots—impose a sense of violence and instability, evoking themes of aggression, fragmentation, and the collapse of visual control.
Technique & Style
Parrino applied dark, gestural lines and stippled marks directly onto the photographic surface using pencil and synthetic polymer paint. The hand-drawn elements obscure and interact with the photographic detail, creating a layered, unstable image. The technique rejects polished finish in favor of raw, immediate intervention, aligning with punk-derived aesthetics that valorize disruption over refinement.
History & Provenance
This work emerged during a period when Parrino was actively redefining painting through physical manipulation of supports. Though not part of a named series, it continues his practice of overlaying monochromatic marks on photographic material, a method he developed in the late 1980s. The piece entered public collections following his recognition within post-punk and neo-conceptual art circles in the 1990s.
Context
Parrino’s approach responded to the decline of high modernist abstraction, infusing it with punk’s anti-aesthetic ethos. By embedding photographic realism within painted chaos, he questioned the autonomy of both mediums. His work resonated with contemporaries exploring the decay of formal purity, drawing from industrial decay, underground music scenes, and the physicality of the art object.
Legacy
Parrino’s fusion of photography and painted intervention influenced later artists investigating the materiality of images. His rejection of pristine surfaces and embrace of damage as content contributed to broader shifts in contemporary art toward process-driven, anti-idealized forms. Though not widely exhibited during his lifetime, his methods gained renewed attention in the 2000s as part of a reassessment of 1980s–90s countercultural practices.
Artist & collection
Artist
Steven Parrino (1958–2005) was an American artist and noise musician associated with punk and post-punk nihilism.
