Ross Bleckner
Flowers - Flowers
June 21, 2024 - September 29, 2024
The flower paintings on display from the Jablonka Collection date from 1995 to 2022, meaning they were created during different periods of the artist's career.
"I have been painting flowers for a long time, but I don't see them as flowers. They have to do with the passing of time and transience," says the artist himself. Flowers that seem to float on the background, a floral explosion on a dark background, bold colors, blurred shapes - and always reflections of light that flash out of the darkness.
Behind this are existential themes: the transition from blossoming to decay, the living and mortality. Since his artistic beginnings in the late 1970s, Ross Bleckner has reacted to current events in his surroundings in his paintings. The AIDS epidemic, to which he lost many of his homosexual friends, his father's cancer and death, his sister's schizophrenia - Bleckner deals with all of this artistically. More recently, the process of ageing has also been part of his work, which, as he says himself, fills him with dread.
His flower paintings are compositions of light and dark that glide over a surface and end in the abstract.
Light plays a major role in Bleckner's work: "I prefer to work the dark out of the light rather than lay it over the light. That's my optimism, the childish part of my brain. It wants to make things better, wants them to succeed." Because: "There's light at the end."
Beauty is the hook
Beauty as a fishhook
Or as Ross Bleckner once said in a video: "I think things can't be beautiful enough." His flower paintings entice at first glance and reveal themselves at second. As in the painting "Hothouse" from 1995 (photo below right). Bleckner paints the stemless flowers in this "glass house" on a black background.
Richard Milazzo has been intensively involved with Bleckner's painting for decades, including this painting, which for him consists of extremes. The sensual, colorful blossoms float on the artificial surroundings of the black background; they are actually abstract creatures that are considered flowers. They stand for blossoming, fading and dying. As well as for the polarity of life, the "fine balance" between life and death, sexuality and illness, extreme behavior and political-social responsibility.
Catalog Ross Bleckner "Flowers"
Life is too short. There are no short cuts.
Says Eric Fischl about "Ross Bleckner's Flower Shop". One of the texts in the catalog for the exhibition at KiS - Kunst in Seefeld.
Catalog with 47 pages, text contributions by Ross Bleckner, Eric Fischl and Rafael Jablonka.
€ 25,-. For members of the KiS association: € 15.
Ross Bleckner
Life and art
Ross Bleckner was born in New York in 1949. At New York University, where he studied with Sol LeWitt and others, he completed his Bachelor's degree in Fine Art before continuing his studies at the California Institute of the Arts, where he also became friends with David Salle.
His exhibition activities began as early as the mid-70s. When AIDS became a threat to him and his homosexual friends shortly afterwards, Bleckner dealt with this in his paintings. His Stripe Paintings, the Architecture of the Sky series and the Cell Paintings earned him a great deal of attention and he had his first solo exhibitions in major US museums such as the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco. All of this took place in the 80s and 90s.
His first artistic highlight: in 1995, when Bleckner was 45 years old, the Guggenheim Museum in New York dedicated a mid-career retrospective to him as the youngest artist to date as part of a solo exhibition. His works can be seen in numerous major museums around the world: Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art, both in New York, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Martin Gropius Bau Berlin, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia Madrid, Kunstmuseum Luzern, Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, and others.
Works by Ross Bleckner were also exhibited in 2020 as part of the My Generation exhibition with works from the Jablonka Collection at the Albertina in Vienna. He is represented by Petzel Gallery, New York, Mariani Mercer Gallery, Brussels, and Galeria Mazzoli, Modena, among others.
Ross Bleckner lives and works in New York and the surrounding area.
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