Ross Bleckner’s work first attracted the art world’s attention in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, along with David Salle, Eric Fischl, and Julian Schnabel. At the outset of his career he created a series of works (the Stripe Paintings) that produced a moving effect following the Op Art movement of the 1960's. Later on, though, he adopted a painting style that oscillated between abstraction and representation, focusing on a play between light and darkness.
His semi-transparent, recurring motifs of flowers, flying birds or cellular structures of AIDS or cancer, constitute a symbolic visual writing. These images look faint, as if seen from afar, a fact that renders their identity indecipherable. At the core of Bleckner’s subject matter, one could detect the sense of loss, the pursuit of the ephemeral idea of beauty, the mutability of time, revisited through the antitheses: organic – inorganic, microcosm – macrocosm, proximity – remoteness.
Ross Bleckner was born in Brooklyn, NY in 1949. He received his B.A. from New York University in 1971 and his M.F.A from Cal Arts in 1973. In 1995, at the age of 45, he became the youngest artist to receive a retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. He has taught in numerous prestigious universities of the US and his works are held in collections around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, NY; Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin; Kunstmuseum Luzern and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. In 2009 he was the first artist to be appointed Goodwill Ambassador by the United Nations and in 2010 he was honored by the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, NY for his 'contributions to cultural and humanitarian causes throughout the world'.
