Ross Bleckner

The Paintings of Ross Bleckner is the first monograph on the artist covering thirty years of his work, from 1976 to 2006. About the book, the author Richard Milazzo writes: “The work has always been interested in bringing abstract painting closer to the realities of the external world, while endeavoring to plumb the depths of the subliminal realm of the psyche. Much lauded for the work Bleckner has done for ACRIA, the American Community Research Institute Initiative on AIDS, and as an outspoken advocate of the fight against the disease since the late 1980s, his paintings are symbolic expressions of a larger humanity, and, as such, also comprise formal as well as social values.”

Further, he explains: “Bleckner’s work can be appreciated also for its ‘non-signature qualities – for his independent-mindedness and his willingness and ability to change the ‘look’ of his paintings whenever he has seen fit to do so, something he has done relentlessly since the very beginning of his career in the 1970s. So, rather than commence where his retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York left off, in 1995, this book traces the development of the artist’s work through all its various phases, and tries to show, with the greatest possible detail, its multifaceted nature.”

The monograph begins with an analysis of Bleckner’s much overlooked Constructivist and Post-Constructivist paintings of the 1970s. It continues with chapter by chapter studies of all the series: the Stripe, Weather, Chandelier, and Memorial (or AIDS) paintings of the early to mid-1980s; the Post-Memorial or Stripe paintings reprised, the Unknown Quantities of Light, the Knight/Night and Architecture of the Sky series of the mid- to late 1980s; the Examined Life and Flower paintings of the early to mid-1990s; the Dream and Do, Cell and DNA works of the mid- to late 1990s; and the Specific and Anonymous, Inheritance, Protein, and Meditation paintings of the New Millennium.