Steven Parrino's work responds to the dictum "Painting is dead." In the 1980s, he began to attack his canvases, piercing them or detaching them from their stretchers to create rough, folded, or sagging surfaces, what he called "misshaped paintings.” Often rendered in Parrino's fetish colors of black and silver, these works referenced Minimalism and Donald Judd's critique of painting's flatness and rectangular shape. Equally inspired by punk, pop, and low culture, Parrino used photos of iconoclastic figures like Hells Angels and Johnny Cash and imagery, such as swastikas and Rebel flags, in his drawings and works on paper.