ROSS BLECKNER

 

Born 1949, New York City; lives and works in New York City and Sagaponack, New York.

 

American artist Ross Bleckner studied painting with Sol LeWitt and Chuck Close at New York University, and earned an MFA from California Institute of the Arts. His works have been shown in prominent galleries and museums throughout the world. He emerged on the vibrant New York arts scene in the 1980s, along with Julian Schnabel, Donald Sultan, and Jeff Koons as one of the fresh young artists redefining contemporary painting.  His mid-career retrospective was presented in 1995 by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and accompanied by a monograph.

 

Bleckner is known for painting elegant emotional compositions full of color, light, and movement. He often employs a soft blurring of his images; the resulting effect is a sense of being in a moment of time actually passing in the present. “My work is elliptical. I think it’s more sensitive to being open to different kinds of relationships, all the various routes that are possible to find a solution.”

 

Paintings from his wildly popular series, Flowers, were included in the 2004 exhibition, “Flowers Observed, Flowers Transformed,” at the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. The Flower paintings are expressionistic predecessors to Bleckner’s series of paintings on DNA, which are based on the molecular structure of cells.

 

Bleckner’s work can be found in important museum collections including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Eli Broad Family Foundation in Santa Monica, the Saatchi Gallery in London, and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, to name a few.