This monograph, the first devoted to the important New York-based painter Ross Bleckner, is published on the occasion of a mid-career retrospective organized by the Guggenheim Museum. In the 1980s, Bleckner emerged as a central figure in the revival of American painting, a position he has solidified in the 1990s. Through various subjects and motifs - optically dizzying stripes, nocturnal landscapes, funerary urns, memorial imagery, chandeliers, abstract domes, and constellations - Bleckner evokes memory, desire, and irony in order to examine the uncertainty of the human condition, while simultaneously celebrating the transcendent principles of nature and the cosmos.
Produced in collaboration with the artist, this book captures the beauty and presence of Bleckner's paintings through oversized, vividly realized reproductions. It also provides the first major scholarly appreciation of the artist's work.
