Painted at a pivotal moment in his career, Ross Bleckner’s Cage of 1986 is emblematic of many of the themes and painterly issues with which the artist was grappling at the time. Emblazoned with hauntingly beautiful green, white and blue stripes of varying saturation and density, Cage plays with the materiality of light as both progenitor of and respondent to the visual world as well as its metaphorical connotations of liberation and freedom. The humming birds, scattered throughout the composition, similarly embody this metaphoric gravity trapped as they are above and behind these bands but also within the picture plane – beings constantly in motion yet simultaneously hovering, still and immobile.

Even as the work clearly elucidates many of the theoretical concerns of paintings being discussed in the mid-1980s, Cage additionally directly tackles the politicization of the arts, and of the artist’s practice, with the ascendant realization of the severity and trauma of the AIDS crisis at the time. No longer seeing fit to paint purely abstract pictures of their own accord, Bleckner realized and began to incorporate a greater consideration of how his practice and his art were affected by and could comment on the most pertinent issue of the day. As such, Cage is the embodiment of this inflection point in Bleckner's career and a seminal work by the artist, recognized by no less a socially aware philanthropist and collector as Vera List, in whose collection this work resided for many years.