Background
Bleckner was born on March 12, 1949 in New York City, New York, United States.
1991
Mary Boone and Ross Bleckner
2009
68 Lexington Ave, New York, NY 10010, United States
Ross Bleckner and Mary Boone attend Creative Time's annual benefit at the 69th Regiment Armory on May 6, 2009 in New York City.
2013
150 W 17th St, New York, NY 10011, United States
(left to right) Koshin Paley Ellison, Ross Bleckner, Rajan Mamtani and Robert Chodo Campbell attend the 2013 Contemplative Care Awards at Rubin Museum of Art.
2015
99 Gansevoort St, New York, NY 10014, United States
Ross Bleckner and Rajan Mamtani attend the Max Mara, presenting sponsor's, celebration of the opening of The Whitney Museum Of American Art at it's new location.
New York University, New York City, New York, United States
Bleckner received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from New York University in 1971.
24700 McBean Pkwy, Valencia, California, United States
Bleckner earned his Master of Fine Arts from California Institute of the Arts in 1973.
Ross Bleckner and Zachari Logan
Eric Fischl, Chuck Close, Ralph Gibson and Ross Bleckner
Bleckner was born on March 12, 1949 in New York City, New York, United States.
Bleckner received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from New York University in 1971. Two years later he earned his Master of Fine Arts from California Institute of the Arts.
Bleckner saw his first exhibition, The Responsive Eye, a show of Op art on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1965. That exhibition had a strong impact on him. In 1975, Ross held his first solo exhibition at Cunningham Ward Gallery in New York. Then in 1979, he began his long association with Mary Boone Gallery. In 1981, Bleckner met Thomas Ammann, an important Swiss art dealer who went on to collect his work.
Ross's early 1980s "Stripe" paintings, were not particularly well-received by critics. Then appeared his Weather series in 1983. During that time he was painting canvases he viewed as memorials, in which candelabras, vases, chandeliers and rococo motifs seem to float against dark grounds. This imagery was in part a response to the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. One of Bleckner's earliest artwork that reflected the AIDS epidemic was a painting called "Small Count", 1980. Other well-known paintings related to the AIDS epidemic are "8,122+ As of January", 1986 and "Throbbing Heart", 1994.
Bleckner's first solo museum exhibition was organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1988. He represented his "Constellation" paintings, 1987-1993, suggestive of night skies, and the Architecture of the Sky canvases, 1988-1993, which call to mind domed interiors. In addition, in the early 1990s, he did his first painting called "Cell" painting which showed an example of human body cell diseases. Ross has also created a series of bird paintings, 1995-2003 and experimented with varied surfaces as well as the use of an airbrush.
In 1993, Bleckner bought a property formerly belonging to Truman Capote in Sagaponack. He has been represented in many group exhibitions devoted to abstraction, among other themes, as well as the Whitney Biennial, 1975, 1987 and 1989, Biennale of Sydney, 1988 and Carnegie International, 1988. Bleckner has taught at New York University for over a decade. Nowadays he is a clinical professor of Studio Art at New York University Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development.
My Sister's Brain
2012Flower Power
2011Black Monet
2013Nevertheless
2015Mausoleum
2013Separated by a Curtain
2012My New Brain
2015Outstanding European
1989Prayer Painting
2012Cage
1986Hand to Hand
2001Happiness for Instance
1996All the Facts
1996Dome
2016B.M.A.P.
2003The Fifth Examined Life
1989Greenhouse
1995Doctor (Dr. Donald Kaplan)
2013Obituary Painting
2012Mausoleum
2013Life to a Lonely Dragon
1981Birds
1999Dome
2016Under
2003The Substitution of Time for Eternity
2009Untitled
2011Open Dome
1999In Replication
1998The Tenth Examined Life
1991Specific and Anonymous
2001
Quotations:
"Bring something new, something beautiful and something filled with light into the world."
"It almost seems that if you can describe it, you can change it."
"A community of people, that's the really what art school is."
"A spiritual search in art is looking for meaning outside of yourself."
"If you follow the process of a thought - any thought, not just about art - the thought changes. It has to do with what you can hold in your memory and what you lose. That's an interesting thing to try to paint."
Bleckner is on the board of AIDS Community Research Initiative of America.