Ross Bleckner

Ross Bleckner was born in New York City in 1949. In 1971, he received his BA at New York University and two years later, his MFA from California Institute of the Arts. Emerging as a prominent artist in New York during the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, Bleckner’s paintings are an investigation of change, loss, and memory, often suggesting meditations on the body, health and disease, much like a memento mori. “The idea that the body is so perfect, until it’s not perfect. It’s a fragile membrane that separates us from disaster.” His immersive paintings, whether pure abstraction of stripes or dots, or more representational renderings of birds, flowers, and brains, elicit a powerful hypnotic and dizzying effect. Smoothly layered on the canvas surface against a darker gray background, Bleckner’s famous multicolored volumetric circles or “cells” look like droplets of blood or molecules viewed under a microscope. Other important series include Constellation, suggestive of night skies, and the Architecture of the Sky, which call to mind domed interiors,  and a series of bird paintings where he experimented with varied surfaces as well as the use of an airbrush. Lately, he's been working on a series inspired by Claude Monet's Nymphéas. Bleckner’s delicate flowers betray a form of anxiety that their apparent fragility makes evident. Even if the artist does not conceive his paintings as vanities, they nonetheless remind us of an art form that goes beyond the elegance of a bouquet or a still life and reveals to the viewer a work tinged with spirituality.

 

To this day, Bleckner is the youngest artist to receive a midcareer retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, at the age of 45. His paintings can be found in several major museums including the Museum of Modern Art and in the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, as well as numerous exhibitions, including at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin, Reina Sofia, Madrid, L.A. County Museum, Los Angeles, Kunstmuseum Luzern, Luzern, and Zentrum Paul Klee, Ber.

In the past decades Bleckner has become well known his support of humanitarian causes, including the fight against AIDS. He is also the first artist to have been appointed Goodwill Ambassador of the United Nations, in 2009.