Ross Bleckner - Contemporary Art Part I New York Thursday, November 15, 2007 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Mary Boone Gallery, New York; Private collection, Fribourg (Switzerland)

  • Exhibited

    NewYork, Mary Boone Gallery, Ross Bleckner, January - February 28, 1987; NewYork, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Ross Bleckner Retrospective, March 3 - May 14, 1995

  • Literature


    D. McGill, “An Artist’s Journey from Obscurity to Success,” The NewYork Times,
    February 19, 1987, p. C30 (illustrated); R. Smith, “Art: in Bleckner Show, An Array of Past
    Motifs,” The New York Times, February 13, 1987; M. Brenson, “Gallery View; Two ArtistsWho
    Flourish in a Postmodern Climate,” The New York Times, February 22, 1987; D. Cameron, NY
    Art Now, Milan, 1988, pp. 80-81 (illustrated); B. Schwabsky, “Memories of Light – Ross Bleckner,
    Guggenheim Museum, NewYork, NewYork,” Art in America, December, 1995; L. Dennison,
    Ross Bleckner: Painter of Light, NewYork, 1995, cat. no. 36, pp. 98-99 (illustrated); I. Sandler,
    Art of the Postmodern Era: From the Lates 1960s to the Early 1990s, NewYork, 1998, p. 260

  • Catalogue Essay

    Today, it seems artists are increasingly being asked to stake out an easily identifiable position, to be either an activist or abstractionist, poet or pedagogue. Bleckner doesn’t work that way. Too modernist or not modernist enough, too earnest and too ironic, too middlebrow but too refined, Bleckner goes against the grain of the moment. That’s not an uninteresting place to be. (B. Schwabsky, “Ross Bleckner, Guggenheim Museum,” Art in America, 1995).  Ross Bleckner has long made a habit of appropriating out-of-favor modes of painting as a means of imparting a distanced criticism. His Stripe paintings of the early 1980s, for example, mimicked the hard-edged minimalist abstraction of Op Art with their vertical black and white composition; exuding an eerie luminescence even while under the harsh glare of Bleckner’s ironic commentary. Infatuation, 1986-87, found Bleckner imitating his own stripe motif in witty fashion: the monumentally large painting borrows the stripe format but renders it a fantasy-land palette of candy colors dominated by reds and whites, a trompe-l’oeil bow in the upper-left center of the canvas. Repackaged as a package, Bleckner is able to play the prison-bar associationsof the original Stripe paintings against the different sort of containment suggested by gift wrapping, cultivating the ambiguity that has become the hallmark of his entire oeuvre, stylistically-varied as it may be. “Bleckner’s work embodies the uncertainty of the present he has inhabited. He has eschewed speculation about the future-utopian or otherwise-in favor of an engagement with a present psychological reality that combines memory, desire, and uncertainty, underscored by moments of nostalgia, melancholy, pessimism and irony... Moving between figuration and abstraction, kitsch and pathos, irony and deadpan expression, Bleckner has seemed to cultivate an ambiguity between these polarities in his paintings,” (L. Dennison, RossBleckner, New York, 1995).

  • 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.

    View More Works

63

Infatuation

1986-1987
Oil on linen.
96 x 200 in. (243.8 x 508 cm).
Signed, titled and dated “Ross Bleckner 1986-1987 ‘Infatuation’ Ross B.” on the reverse.

Estimate
$100,000 - 150,000 

Sold for $121,000

Contemporary Art Part I

15 Nov 2007, 7pm
New York