Ross Bleckner

Ross Bleckner paints images that are visually dramatic and subtly representative of the artist's interest in human confrontations with tragedies. Time—and, by extension, mortality—has been a prevailing theme of Bleckner's work since he began exhibiting in the late 1970s. Much of Bleckner's work deals with the AIDS crisis and "the idea that something beautiful, like a cell, can mutate into something treacherous."

His large-scale paintings depict flowers that are profuse and brightly colored, yet deliquesced, scraped away, and abstracted until they become blurs of paint, birds, and human cells floating in dark color fields, as though they were stars cast into the night sky. This prepossession of light and mortality—expressed through symbolic organic forms and painterly abstraction—is a theme that runs throughout Bleckner's thirty-year body of work.

 ​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 the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, among others.