(New York City 1949–lives and works in New York City)

Untitled. 1988.

Watercolour on paper.

Signed, dated and numbered on the reserve: Ross Bleckner 12/1988.

41 x 31 cm.

Provenance:
- Waddington Galleries, London (verso with the label).
- Roland Berger Corporate Art Collection, Munich.

Ross Bleckner is of the generation of artists who emerged between the movements of Neo-geometric abstraction and the return of figurative art in New Image Paintings. Thus, with his individual formal language, which navigates symbolically charged recurring themes, he still occupies a distinct artistic position.

After completing his art studies at New York University and California Institute of the Arts at the beginning of the 1970s , Ross Bleckner moved back to New York, where he set up a studio in the trendy TriBeCa district.

Inspired by the power of illusions in Op Art, he firstly engaged fully with lines and a richly contrasting interplay between light and dark. The latter increasingly became a core feature in his body of work, while he gradually moved towards the use of figurative pictorial elements. The metaphorical and symbolic value of certain motifs, especially flowers, candelabras and birds, were used by Ross Bleckner from the 1980s, in order to give expression to his examination of life as a continuous accumulation of fleeting moments. His interest in transience was due in great part to the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, which greatly affected Ross Bleckner, who was openly homosexual. In addition, for him, the realisation of man’s vulnerability is a phenomenon of universal relevance, which is also the driving force behind his realistic paintings of mutated cells at microscopic level.

Ross Bleckner himself sees it as his artistic duty to reveal the fragile nature of life, but at the same time, despite all the melodrama contained therein, to inject a sign of hope and to endorse a state of conscious experience.