"Palermo, Works 1973–1976"

Born Peter Schwarze in Leipzig, Germany, Palermo (1943–1977) took his name from a mobbed-up American boxing promoter who at one point managed heavyweight fighter Sonny Liston. It was an odd moniker for the idiosyncratic formalist painter, who pushed the boundaries of the genre's format. He created geometric abstractions, for example, on loose pieces of fabric, aluminum panels and eccentrically shaped canvases, resulting in spare compositions made buoyant by an ebulliently optical palette.