Ross Bleckner - Contemporary Art Evening Sale New York Friday, March 4, 2011 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Portico Inc., Philadelphia; Acquired from the above by the previous owner; Leo Koenig, Inc., New York; Private collection, Belgium

  • Catalogue Essay

    Essentially, I want a world to exist that I can get into. A world that has to do with certain kinds of illusion and that is also confrontational. The paintings hold you outside of their making. I work very much like a rubber hand. I start with an idea or an image and then I stretch it out and let it collapse back into itself. That’s how the stripes in my abstract paintings have always functioned. That are confrontational in that they collide with what is represented in my other paintings. The imagery is more phenomenological in the stripes. It had to be constructed within the relationship of the spectator to the painting because it wasn’t in the painting and it wasn’t in the spectator. ROSS BLECKNER
     
    (Ross Bleckner in an interview with Aimee Rankin, BOMB, Issue 19, Spring 1987, pp. 22-27)

  • Artist Biography

    Ross Bleckner

    American • 1949

    Ross Bleckner's large-scale, almost-cosmic abstract paintings came to define a certain aesthetic era in New York in the 1980s and '90s. As much known for his celebrity friendships and Sex and the City references to his long-time relationship with gallerist Mary Boone, Bleckner is somewhat of a star, especially as the youngest artist to receive a solo retrospective at the Guggenheim at the age of 46. 

    His circular dot paintings, which serve as both activism and tribute to the disastrous impact of the AIDS empidemic on New York's gay community, are some of his most buzzed-about and recognizable works still today. However, his heydey was hardly just the '90s—with international gallery exhibitions yearly and a steady, accessible market that has held its value; in 2016, Artnet described Bleckner as an "'80s Art World 'It' Boy Having a New York Moment" when he had six shows running concurrently.

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22

Pausing and inhaling

1981
Acrylic and mixed media on canvas.
88 x 60 in. (223.5 x 152.4 cm).
Signed twice, titled and dated “Ross Bleckner Pausing and inhaling 1981” on the reverse.

Estimate
$60,000 - 80,000 

Contemporary Art Evening Sale

4 March 2011
New York