Ross Bleckner was born in New York in 1949. He studied fine art at New York University
in 1971 and then at the California Institute of the Arts where he received his Masters
Degree in 1973.
Bleckner found early fame in the New York art scene of the 1980’s, along with contemporaries Julian Schnabel, Francesco Clemente, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. Commercial exhibitions at Mary Boone Gallery, New York, Thomas Amman in Zurich and Waddington in London spurred demand from leading contemporary art collectors.
Perhaps best known for the work he produced at this time: Bleckner's first 'Cell
paintings', in the context of the AIDS epidemic, explored ideas of loss, change,
time and memory – themes that remain central to his work to today.
Symbols and anatomical imagery are used to reference parts of the human body at the
microscopic level, and with paint that is applied in smooth layers onto the canvas, his
paintings have an immersive affect that allude to the cosmos and an engagement with
the idea of the sublime.
‘Life is short. Life goes fast’ he has said. ‘And what I really want to do in my life is to
bring something new, something beautiful and something filled with light into the
world.’
Bleckner’s first solo museum exhibition was organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1988. Bleckner is the youngest artist to date to receive a midcareer retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1995). The Whitney Museum of American Art and MoMA in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid;
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC are a few of the Museums to have collected the artist’s work.
In 2009 Bleckner was awarded the title Goodwill Ambassador by the United Nations; the artist continues to live and work in New York City.