Ross Bleckner, Before and After Being Young, 1987

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oil on linen

304.8 x 213.36 cm
120 x 84 in

Coming of age in the 1970s, Ross Bleckner was a key member of a generation of artists that championed painting at a time when the artform was being dismissed by...

Coming of age in the 1970s, Ross Bleckner was a key member of a generation of artists that championed painting at a time when the artform was being dismissed by many as being old fashioned and not fit for purpose. Along with his colleagues David Salle and Eric Fischl, the young artist helped to shape the future of painting in the United States as he pushed for a more postmodernist tact that eschewed the material specificity of his forebearers. Working with a strict pattern, Bleckner interrupts order with stains, shapes, and clouds of pigment that work to haze and obscure the primacy of the black and white structure. By doing so, he allows the audience to become entranced by the work and separate themselves from the physical act of viewing. “The imagery is more phenomenological in the stripes,” the artist insists. “It had to be constructed within the relationship of the spectator to the painting because it wasn’t in the painting and it wasn’t in the spectator” (R. Bleckner, quoted in A. Rankin, “Ross Bleckner by Aimee Rankin,” BOMB, Issue 19, April 1, 1987).

Working in earnest during the beginning of the AIDS crisis, Bleckner often used his canvases to reference broader ideas of mortality and loss while still adhering to a rigid set of visual conventions. His paintings deal "literally and metaphorically with the idea of death" (M. Herbert, "Ross Bleckner", Tema Celeste, 2001, p. 83.). Each strip acts as a channel in our own vision that beckons a deeper journey into the fog of memory hidden beyond the surface. The painting becomes a talisman for reminiscing about events catalogued away in our minds.

Provenance

Private Collection, New York
Mary Boone Gallery, New York
MARUANI MERCIER, Belgium

Exhibitions

Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI
Contemporary Art Museum, Houston, TX
The Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA
Ross Bleckner, Art Gallery of Ontario, March 7, 1989 - April 1, 1990, catalog p. 27 (illustrated), Toronto, Ontario, Canada
With You I Want to Live: The Gordon Locksley and Dr. George T. Shea Collection, Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale, March 23, 2009 - March 22, 2010, catalog p. 25 (illustrated), Fort Lauderdale, FL
Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Until Now: Collecting the New (c .1960-2010), April 16 - August 1, 2010 (on extended loan August 2, 2010 - October 28, 2013), Minneapolis, MN

Literature

Tema Celeste: Rivista D'Arte Contemporanea, no. 14, December 1987 - February 1988, cover (illustrated)

Group Exhibition: Memory

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Maruani Mercier

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Ross Bleckner United States, b. 1949

Provenance

Exhibitions

Literature