“I have been painting flowers for a long time, but I don’t see them as flowers. They have to do with the passing of time and transience,” says Bleckner. Hot off the presses is the catalogue for Ross Blecker’s new solo exhibition at Kunst in Seefeld, “Flowers.” Compiling works spanning three decades, the exhibition takes as its subject the evolution of the artist’s fruitful fixation on flowers. Printed in both German and English, the catalogue features text from Eric Fischl, Rafael Jablonka, and Ross Bleckner. 

Authors: Eric Fischl, Rafael Jablonka, Ross Bleckner

Publisher: Kunst in Seefeld, 2024

Language: German and English

Softcover: 48 pages

9.5 in x 12.5 in x .25 in

ISBN: 978320009852

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.