Ross Bleckner: Consciousness More Than Anything

“My work is really about consciousness more than anything.”

–– Ross Bleckner, The New York Times, April 25, 2019 

We are pleased to invite you to view Ross Bleckner: Consciousness More Than Anything, a virtual exhibition of recent paintings by the influential New York artist. 

Ross Bleckner’s immersive paintings elicit a powerful hypnotic, dizzying effect. Whether pure abstraction of stripes or dots or more representational renderings of flowers, Bleckner's works in this exhibition reveal phenomena of paint and light teetering between a call for salvation and a silent abyss. These exquisite paintings are meditations on light: at once natural and artificial, an effect of and its very substance. The light in Bleckner's paintings is puncturing sheets of darkness expressing a cautious optimism—a kind of hope—or an aesthetic of, as he states, “an idealistic dystopia.” “It is about dredging … finding light through the darkness,” he said.

Central to the artist’s practice of painting is a methodological layering of paint onto the canvas and then scraping it away—a perpetual process of creating and editing, adding and subtracting. “I paint,” he explains, “the way one constructs a building,” achieving an intricate depth of color by slowly, gradually layering paint onto his canvases. 

Bleckner’s first solo museum exhibition was organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1988. His work has since been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including a midcareer retrospective organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1995. He has been represented in many group exhibitions including the Whitney Biennial (1975, 1987, and 1989), Biennale of Sydney (1988), and Carnegie International (1988). He lives and works in New York and the Hamptons.