Lehmann Maupin is pleased to announce an exhibition of paintings by New York artist Ross Bleckner. After graduating from New York University, Bleckner went to study at Cal Arts in Valencia, CA. Bleckner then returned to New York in 1973 and began exhibiting his work internationally soon thereafter. The Guggenheim Museum in New York held a mid-career retrospective of Bleckner's work in 1995.
Ross Bleckner has made a suite of five large-scale paintings each measuring ten by nine feet synthesizing many of the visual and conceptual ideas of his work from the past fifteen years. One finds both the opticality of the stripe paintings and the poignancy of the flowers, and this new series relates directly to the examined life paintings. Bleckner's luminous and passionate paintings have often been related to the effort to memorialize the loss of many to the AIDS epidemic. However, in this new group of paintings, Bleckner's signature luminosity and opticality conveys the energy of building new life and the wonderful uneasiness of creation. The large surface of each canvas is built up by a labor intensive process of assembling layers of small cells. Groups of cells cluster to form larger organisms. Rings of electric energy glow like halos. The titles of these painting such as "Times and Communities" and "Signaling Pathway" reflect the artist's consideration of how networks multiply and expand in the presence of energy and life. Furthermore, the meshworks of organisms and virtual systems are new communities unique to our time at the end of this millennium. The construction of these paintings also references the uniform pixelated structure of the digital image. Bleckner takes that rigid format and pushes its flat geometry towards material substance and a fuller field of potential.
Simultaneous to this exhibition, Twelve Trees Press will release "Page Three", a book which presents a collection of found newspaper clippings taken directly from page three of the New York Times. These clippings highlight the existing juxtaposition a journalistic photograph illustrating the lead international news story side by side with an advertisement for Tiffany's jewelry consistently placed together in the same corner. This publication further explores the tension between suffering and celebration which one finds in Bleckner's paintings. |
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