This award winning catalogue of Ross Bleckner’s most recent paintings at Dallas Contemporary highlights a focused look at the four themes Bleckner has been investigating - geometric abstraction, birds, water lilies, and landscapes. Issues of life, death, balance, and meditation are present in his paintings and installation images from his exhibition. A unique, minimal, and up-lifting publication.

Authors: Peter Doroshenko

Publisher: Dallas Contemporary, 2019

Language: English

Softcover: 124 pages

8.5 in x 12 in x .25 in

ISBN: 978-1792312168

About the Artist

Emerging as a prominent artist in New York during the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, Ross Bleckner’s paintings are an investigation of change, loss, and memory, often suggesting meditations on the body, health and disease, much like a memento mori. “The idea that the body is so perfect, until it’s not perfect. It’s a fragile membrane that separates us from disaster.” His immersive paintings, whether pure abstraction of stripes or dots, or more representational renderings of birds, flowers, and brains, elicit a powerful hypnotic and dizzying effect. Smoothly layered on the canvas surface against a darker gray background, Bleckner’s famous multicolored volumetric circles or “cells” look like droplets of blood or molecules viewed under a microscope.

To this day, Bleckner is the youngest artist to receive a midcareer retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, at the age of 45. His paintings can be found in several major museums, such as the Museum of Modern Art and in the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, as well as numerous exhibitions, including at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin; Reina Sofia, Madrid; L.A. County Museum, Los Angeles; Kunstmuseum Luzern, Luzern; and Zentrum Paul Klee, Ber.