Ross Bleckner

(American, born 1949)

Ross Bleckner is an influential contemporary American artist. Perhaps best known for his paintings dealing with loss and memory, Bleckner notably tackled the emotional toll brought by the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. “Life is short. Life goes fast,” he has said. “And what I really want to do in my life is to bring something new, something beautiful and something filled with light into the world.” His poetic works often employ recurring symbolic imagery, such as candelabras, doves, and flowers, rendered with a blurred, glowing sense of light. Born on May 12, 1949 in New York, NY, he went on to study first at New York University alongside the artists Sol Lewitt and Chuck Close, and then at the California Institute of the Arts where he received his MFA in 1973. Bleckner began exhibiting with Mary Boone gallery in 1979, and was the subject of a retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1995. His work can be found in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, among others. Bleckner lives and works in New York, NY.