Ross Bleckner, Touch and Go, 2024

Ross Bleckner’s Touch and Go (2024) is a luminous meditation on perception and impermanence. In this oil on linen work, forms emerge and dissolve within a moody, atmospheric palette that hovers between abstraction and representation. The entire canvas seems to breathe, softly pulsing with a light that arises from within, suggesting both biological and cosmic forces at play.

The painting draws the viewer into a space that resists fixed interpretation. The soft focus, reminiscent of fading memories or shifting attention, evokes a kind of visual uncertainty. Forms drift in and out of legibility. This ambiguity mirrors the workings of the mind and touches on the porous boundaries between body and psyche, interior and exterior, self and other. Bleckner’s use of diffuse color fields and ephemeral shapes underscores the fragility of connection, reflecting on empathy, memory, and our attempts to make sense of a world in flux.

Ross Bleckner (b. 1949, New York) has long explored the themes of memory, loss, and the vulnerability of the human body. Rising to prominence in the 1980s, his work became a poignant response to the AIDS crisis, using abstraction and metaphor to express collective grief and resilience. Bleckner’s signature visual language, whether through cellular imagery, flickering candles, or hauntingly blurred compositions, reveals a profound concern for the precarity of life. A student of Sol LeWitt and Chuck Close, and a key figure in New York’s downtown art scene, Bleckner has consistently merged the personal and the universal, crafting paintings that are as emotionally resonant as they are visually arresting. At the age of 45, Bleckner became the youngest artist to receive a midcareer retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1995.

Commune: Ross Bleckner

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Ross Bleckner United States, b. 1949