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Ross Bleckner
(1949 - living) U.S.A.

Ross Bleckner

Artist

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Born in New York City and raised in Hewlett, a prosperous Long Island suburb, he graduated from George W. Hewlett High School (1967). Bleckner received his B.F.A. from New York University (1971) and his M.F.A. from the California Institute of the Arts (1973). He gained early recognition with his inclusion in the 1975 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. He is the youngest artist ever to have a solo exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

When he was invited back for participation in the 1987 and 1989 Whitney Biennials, Bleckner had since received critical acclaim and was associated with avant-garde currents of the early 1980s. These developments included a revival of figurative art, earlier modernist styles, including abstraction, and a return to importance of painting, all of which carried a retrograde quality given the pluralism and rise of experimental media during the 1970s.

Although Bleckner makes prints and works as a photographer, his primary medium is large-scale oil painting. His paintings draw and play upon earlier traditions of abstraction, particularly the high modernist styles of postwar Abstract Expressionism and 1960s formalist abstraction.

His ironic use of traditional oil painting and styles linked to the heroic period of American abstraction (1950-1970), which was dominated by heterosexual male artists, lies in his integration of gay issues. Bleckner weds his private experience as a gay man to public concerns surrounding gay identity, most especially the AIDS crisis.

Flowers, urns, doves, fruits, chandeliers, and streaks of radiant light figure prominently in Bleckner's elegiac use of an iconography of death and mourning. Borrowing from the past, Bleckner evokes the Dutch tradition of still life paintings that served as memento mori, a reminder of life's brevity and the inevitability of death.

Bleckner conceived the paintings in this group as "memorials" commemorating the loss of life, most hauntingly in their allusion to the tragedy of AIDS. A well known gay artist, he lives in Truman Capote's house on Long Island, New York.

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Sources: Excerpts from http://www.glbtq.com/arts/bleckner_r.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Bleckner
http://www.lehmannmaupin.com/artists/rossbleckner/

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