SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY CHECKLIST

Bleckner. Ross. "Disavowal and Redemption: An Ideology PAINTINGS ROSS BLECKNER of Exhaustion and Renewal" Effects Magazine. no. I Memoriam, 1985 Untitled. 1987 (Summer 1983). p. 15 011 on linen watercolor and ink on paper

16 · x cm.) Bleckner Ross. "Transcendent Ant1-Fet1sh1sm .. Artforum. 48x 40''(121.9 x 101.6 cm.) x 12 (40.6 30.5 vol. 17. no 7 (March 1979). pp 50-55 Colfection of George A Katz and Frances R. Katz, New York Kern Family Collect1 on. New York

Untitled, Brenson. Michael "Ross Bleckner" The New YorkTi mes. Untitled. 1985 1987 watercolor and ink on paper 14 February 1986. p C32 011 and wax on linen 96 x 72"( 2438 x 182.9 cm.) 16 x 12' (40.6 x 30.5 cm.) Cameron, Dan. NYArt Collection i t rv ew) Now the Saatch1 ( n e i . Collection ofJulian Schnabel, New York Collection of Ray Learsy. New York Milan: Giancarlo Politi Ed1tore 1987. pp 67-82. Untitled, 1987 Gate #2. 1986 Cameron. Dan. "On Ross Bleckner's 'Atmosphere' Paintings:· watercolor and ink on paper oil on canvas Arts Magazine. vol. 61. no. 6 (February 1987). pp. 30-33 16 x 12"(40.6 x 30.5 cm.) 120 x 84" (304.8x 213.3 cm.) Collection of Gordon Locksley and George Shea . Paris m Castle. Ted. "Occurrences/New York:' Art Monthly. no. 72 Collection of Norman and Ira Bra an. Mia mi (January 1984). p. 5 Untitled. 1987 Fallen Object. 1987 watercolor and ink on paper Halley, Peter. "Ros s Bleckner Painting at the End of History:· oil on linen 16 x 12" (40.6x 30.5 cm.) Arts Magazine. vol 56. no. 9 (May 1982), pp. 132-33. 48 x 48" (121.9 x 121 9 cm.) Collection of Gordon Locksley and George Shea. Paris Collection of Mr. and Mrs. RobertJ. Woods.Jr.. Los A ngeles Indiana. Gary. "Light and Deat h." The Village Voice, Untitled. 1987 p. 94. Knights Not Nights. 1987 18 February 1986, watercolor and mk on paper 011 on canvas " 16x 12" (40.6 x 30.5 c m.) Klein. Mason Past and Perpetuity 1n the Recent Paintings 108 x 72"(274 3x 182.9 cm.) Collection of Byron Meyer. San Francisco Ross Bleckner:· Arts zin . vol no. cto er of Maga e 61 2 (O b San Francisco Museum of Modern Art . 1986). pp 74-76. Purchase 9793 Untitled. 1988 watercolor and ink on paper Kusp1t. Donald "Ross Bleckner:· Artforum. vol 22 no. 8 RememberThem. 1987 16 x IL"(40.6 x 30.5 cm.) (Apnl 1984), p 82 oil on canvas Collection of Byron Meyer. San Francisco McCarron. John. "Ross Bleckner" (interview) Shi� vol. 1. 111x851/2"(281.9 x217.1 cm.) Untitled. 1987 no. 2 (Spnng 1988). pp 22-23. 36 Collection ofJames and Linda Burrows, Beverly Hills. Ca lifornia watercolor and ink on paper McCormick, Carlo "Ross Bleckner" Flash Art. no 121 16 x 1�"(40 6 x 30.5 cm.) ua (March 1985). pp 42-43 Unknown Q ntities ofLight. PartIV. 1988 Collection of A.J. Rosen Ramsey. New jersey 011 on canvas t4 APRIL ttll Melville, Stephen "Dark Rooms. Allegory and History m 108 X 144"(274.3 x 365.8 cm.) Untitled. 1987 n watercolor and ink on paper the Painti gs of Ross Bleckner" Arts Magazine vol 61. Private collection. New York: courtesy Mary Boone TH ROUGH t2 JUNE ttll n 16x 12" (40.6 x 30.5 cm.) no. 8(A p l 1987), pp. 56-58 Gallery. New York Collection of Aj. Rosen. Ramsey, New Jersey Morgan. Stuart "Strange Days" (interview) Artscribe, Nights With Knights. 1988 SAN FRANCISCO MUSEUM All works on paper courtesy Mary BooneGallery. New York. no 68 (March/April 1988). pp. 48-51. 011 on canvas 108x 72"(274 3x 182.9 cm.) Owens, Craig. "Back to the Studio'.' Art in America. vol. 70, Private collection, New York; courtesy Mary Boone OF MODERN ART no. 1 Oanuar y 1982). pp. 99 107. Gallery. New York P1ncus-W1tten. Robert. "Defenestrations: Robert Longo and Ross Bleckner" Arts Magazine. vol 57 no 3 (N ovember Nights Without Knights. 1988 1982). pp. 94-95 oil on canvas 108x 60" (274.3x 1524 cm.) A SERIES OF Schjeldahl, Peter. ''AV isit to the Salon of Autumn 1987." Private collection New York: courtesy Mary Boone Art in America. vol 74. no 12 (December 1986). pp 15-21. Gallery. New York RECENT WORK BY YOUNGER Schwabsky. Barry "ThePersistance of American Art:· Ross Bleckner1 s the third exh1b1tion n the "New Work" series. a Visual Arts WORKS ON PAPER Awards m the 6. Southeastern Center for program featuring recent workby younger and established artists AND ESTABLISHED ARTISTS Contemporary Arts. Winston-Salem North Carolina. 1987. Untitled. 1987 "New Work"Is generously supported by Collectors Forum. watercolor and ink on paper Smith, Roberta "Ross Bleckner at Mary Boone" Arc in 16 x 12" (40.6x 30.5 cm.) v 1988... tn FranuNew York City. 1949 and with redemption. In it. dots of white impasto emerge from a Lives and works in New York City background darkness made even richer and deeper by a varnished ·11.painter is a person who makes meaning by making feeling:·1 surface to create the effect of brilliant beams of starlight coming EDUCATION - Ross Bleckner into view after having raced through the cosmic depths of the night New York University. B.A .. 1971 For the last several years, a tremendous amount of new painting sky. As these points of luminosity appear out of a fictivedepth. some California Institute of the Arts. Valencia. M. F.A.. 1973 has been received with critical and popular enthusiasm. Ye:. only a are caught and held by graceful hands (inspired by the elegantly decade ago the view that "painting is dead" was confidently ex­ attenuated hands seen in the religious paintings of El Greco) while SELECTED INDIVIDUAL EXHIBITIONS pressed by the vanguard artists and critics associated with min mal others slip through the grasp and continue their fall through space. 1975 and conceptual art. the key American artistic directions of tre 1970s. Knights Not Nights is a painting lamenting the death of those lost Cunningham Ward Gallery. New York In retrospect. however.this sweeping judgement is not difficu It to souIs represented by the uncaught beams of light while. at the same 1976 understand; neither of the painting styles current in the sevent1es­ time. it is a celebration of the enduring hope that lives can be saved. John Doyle Gallery. Chicago the enervated efforts of color-field artists and the conservative 1977 This is elegiac painting; it deals with the ideas of death and contributions of the "new realists" -seemed to represent pro­ Cunningham Ward Gallery. New York survival, of the sublime. the ineffable, the unanswerable. Respond­ gressive tendencies. At the same time, the American art world in ing to the issues it raises. a complex combination of emotions are 1979 general had remained almost blissfully ignorant of the astonis 1ing Mary Boone Gallery. New York evoked. including despair. terror. awe. and joy. The issue of epi­ achievements of a revitalized European art community in which demic, especially the current health emergency. has affected the 1980 artists like Joseph Beuys had succeeded in making an art powerfuI artist deeply; a number of his paintings. including Remember Them. Mary Boone Gallery. New York enough in its forms and its concepts to express and to criticize the have been memorials to victims of AIDS. The younger painter 1981 condition of contemporaryc ulture. Peter Halley has written about Bleckner's response to a modern era Mary Boone Gallery. New York Out of this state of art world affairs in the late 1970s emerged touched so deeply by the tragedy of holocaust. nuclear warfare. and 1982 a new generation of young artists in New York who hungered to epidemic, observing. "His work represents a mood of questioning Patrick Ve relist Galene. Antwerp. Belgium do what was not then being done in America: to make paintings in the wake of this troubled history. and a realization ...that knowl­ Portico Row Gallery. Philadelphia edge may be doubt and that doubt may be light-that the reality of that conveyed and communicated authentic cultural content. Sur­ 1983 veying the recent American art around them. they recognized the disillusionment may also offer the possibility of transcendence:·4 Mary Boone Gallery. New York important accomplishments of minimalist and conceptual artists. Bleckner considers western culture to be in crisis. In part. he 1984 However. they were also aware that minimalism-much of the best sees this as the crisis that comes at the end of a millennium. reveal­ Nature Morte Gallery. New York of which was sculpture-was an art of aggressive muteness. while ing a sensibility acutely aware of death. Emblem paintings like 1985 the eloquent texts frequently incorporated into conceptual art Memoriam. containing such funereal imagery as urns. chalices. and Boston Muse um School were not consistently supported by a commensurate level of visual Knights Not Nights. 1987 flowers. reflect the influence of fin-de-siecle nineteenth-century 1986 interest. They saw little contemporary painting they could respect; Symbolist art and its decadent but richly elegant poeticization of Mario Diacono Gallery. Boston that which they could-the post-minimal work of artists such as death Another aspect is.more specifically related to the end of a Robert Ryman and Brice Marden-did not seem to match their MaryBoone Gallery. New York Like a number of the most interesting painters of our day who century in which American civilization was originally perceived as particular aspirations. 1987 are in reaction to artists' traditional obsession with inventing a nurturing and positive. but has recently metamorphosed into an Mary Boone Gallery. New York unique or "signature" style, Blecknerworks in several quite distinct entity altogether meaner and more cynical. Bleckner feels that our In 1979 an essay written by the young painter Ross Bleckner Margo leavin Gallery. Los Angeles manners and refuses to classify his paintings as either abstract or entitled "Transcendent Anti-Fetishism" was published in Artforum.2 once idealistic and benevolent notion of democracy has mutated, representational. In this exhibition his range is represented by becoming a front behind which "to do things:· On behalf of this new generation of artists, Bleckner articulated a SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS three directions he is currently pursuing: "stripe paintings:· "dot longing for an art reinvested with meanings rooted in the larger 1975 paintings:· and "emblem paintings:· It is Bleckner's sense that today people are looking for some­ o ica Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art. New York psychol g l. social. and political reality. (This article was illJstrated thing in which they can have faith. He believes that art can be a with the work of Bleckner's friends Eric Fischl, David Salle, '1att The stripe paintings-the most abstract. conceptual . and con­ healing and redemptive force: that it can function as an agent of 1979 m Mullican. Barbara Kruger. and Julian Schnabel. plus several ore frontational-have their origins in Op Art. a discredited chapter change. providing leadership by posing fundamental questions. He New Painting/New York. Hayward Gallery. London senior artists including Richard Artschwager and Vito Acconc1.) in recent modernist art. But they are not about 1960s formalist does not himself believe in any conventional notions of religion. Four Artists. Hallwalls. Buffalo. New York Valuing the unmediated directness of painting and seeking to initiate manipulation of optical phenomena; rather. more in the manner of yet he feels the need to challenge his own disbelief in spirituality. 1981 a rupture with the conventions established by the preceding gen­ the Abstract Expressionist Clyfford Still-an artist Bleckner studies acknowledging that things have an "inner glow:· His art. expressing Tenth Anniversary Exhibition. California Institute of the Arts. eration of American abstract painters. Bleckner set out to express and admires-they are concerned with the emotional psychology simultaneously "a sense of wonderment and a sense of disbelief:' Valencia m his art what he has referred to as "libidinal forces and flows" of things taking form in the consciousness. shimmering as they seek universalizes a condition that seems very much of our moment. 1983 through the symbolic form of the visual image. to come into focus. and evaporating like ice becoming steam. In john R. Lane Mary Boone and Her Artists. Seibu Gallery. Tokyo paintings such as Unknown Quantities ofLight. Part IV we see an art Bleckner's art is undeniably romantic. It is also deeply informed Director 1986 of light, atmosphere. and temperature whose soft-edged stripes by a conceptual foundation that gives it the critical. que;tionin End Game: Reference and Simulation in Recent American g have been exquisitely described by the painter Pat Steir as "fibril­ stance which elevates painting beyond formal concerns and sen­ Painting and Sculpture. Institute of Contemporary Art. lating:· Here. a complex meditation on light-the ingredient that. Boston suous appeal. While Bleckner's work has always had this conceptual for Bleckner. is painting's essential element-becomes the illus­ basis-as in the work of Cy Tw ombly. a painter of an elder genera­ 1987 trated subject in a work otherwise absent of representational forms. Biennial. Whitney Museum of American Art. New York tion who has been a source of inspiration for Bleckner-he has 1 Unless otherwise noted. all quotations ofthe artistwere mad e in conversation creating what Schnabel has described in Bleckner's work as "the recently reached a level of art1st1c maturity where the provocative with the author on 15 January and 19 February. 1988. Awards in the Visual Arts6. Grey Art Gallery. New York sensation of the atmosphere as an emblem of an emotional state:· 3 2 Ross Bleckner. "Transcende�t Anto-Fet1sh1sm:· Artforum. vol. 17. no. 7 (March ideas contained in his earlier work are joined with an extraordinary Post Abstract Abstraction. The Aldrich Museum of 1979). pp. 50-55. command of a painterly. formal vocabulary. The result is a highly Perhaps more than any other artist to appear since James Contemporary Art. Ridgefield. Connecticut 3 Juloan Schnabel. C.V.J.(New York· Random House. 1987). p 181 charged art. at once full of ideas and at the same ti me unabashedly Turrell and Robert Irwin, Bleckner has made light his expressive 4 Peter Halley. "Ross 81eckner· Painting at the End of History:· Arts Magazine. (a/Arts Skeptical Belief(s). Renaissance Society. University beautiful. medium. employed to convey his ideas about loss. sadness. and vol 56. no. 9 (May 1982). p. 133 of Chicago