Ross Bleckner

Ross Bleckner – The discovery of Op Art brought him to art

Ross Bleckner was born in New York on 12 May 1949 and spent his childhood in the prosperous town of Hewlett Harbour on Long Island. In 1965, he attended the Op Art exhibition The Responsive Eye in the Museum of Modern Art in New York – it was the first art exhibition he had ever seen and had a lasting influence, leading him eventually to the wish to become an artist. He was encouraged in this by his encounter with Sol LeWitt and Chuck Close, whom he met as fellow students during his studies at New York University. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1971 and then went to Valencia to study for a Master of Fine Arts at the California Institute of the Arts where he met David Salle. In 1974, Bleckner bought a loft apartment in the New York suburb of Tribeca where his neighbours included the painter Julian Schnabel who had rented three floors and held the Mudd Club from 1977 to 1983, a poplar meeting place for visual artists and musicians. 

AIDS and cancer as recurring themes

Ross Bleckner had his first solo exhibition in 1975 at the Cunningham Ward Gallery in New York, and four years later, he began his long-term collaboration with the New York Mary Bone Gallery. Bleckner celebrated success in the 1980s with his large-format striped paintings inspired by the ideas and motifs of Op Art. By deliberately incorporating blurring, the artist created a striking flickering effect in contrast to the strictly geometric forms. Bleckner found an admirer and patron in the Swiss art dealer Thomas Ammann, who purchased numerous paintings. Like Ammann himself, Bleckner also showed great commitment against AIDS, which was particularly rampant in the art scene, and dealt with this theme in some of his works. His father's cancer also inspired the artist to work with forms relating to the depiction of human DNA and cells. In the mid-1990s, Bleckner went through a phase in which he created several bird paintings.

Bleckner creates modern art which gets under the skin

As an artist, Ross Bleckner is interested in what lies hidden beneath the surface. With his pictures, he often tries to decipher the true structure of things as if with a microscope. He is sometimes accused of romantic or even sentimental tendencies, for example when he symbolises human fears of loss through a conglomerate of oil and watercolours, but the artist himself sees this primarily as an expression of his personal spiritual search. Bleckner has been honoured with numerous solo exhibitions in renowned museums, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Carnegie Museum of Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Today, his works can be found in numerous public and private collections and are sought-after on the art market.

Ross Bleckner lives and works in New York and Sagaponack.