Blinky Palermo (1943 -77) was born Peter Schwarze in Leipzig, in what would shortly become East Germany. He and his twin brother were adopted as infants by a family named Heisterkamp, a name they took. The family soon moved to the West German city of Munster, where Palermo's adoptive mother fell seriously ill and died when the boy was fifteen. He was rechristened once more in 1964, when he entered Joseph Beuys's class at the Kunstakademi Düsseldorf, taking the curious moniker of Sonny Liston's Mafia manager, Frank "Blinky" Palermo. He remained notoriously quiet in public and was especially reserved about his art. There were problems with alcohol and drugs, and he died on the remote Maldive island of Kurumba. It's the resume of a romantic.

From 1968 Palermo produced murals and wall drawings that intervened directly in the architectural space, but from 1972 he executed his paintings on steel or aluminium. Many of these were made in New York. Its emphasis, however, is on colour and surface, which makes it difficult to classify stylistically; there are elements, for example, of gestural abstraction and even of the human figure in fragmentary form.

Blinky Palermo is represented with two works in Ladonia:

Black Triangle 1970 (installed in a cave opening)

BlueTriangle 1970