Mary Boone Gallery opens at its Chelsea location an exhibition of new paintings by Ross Bleckner. 

Ross Bleckner has for forty years investigated the intersection of psychology, biology, and personal identity through painting. The result has been markedly different series of work - form geometric abstraction, to space suggested through nebulous fields or stripes, to painterly systems of constellations and architecture, to explicitly symbolic works employing images of urns, chandeliers, flags, birds, flowers, words and numbers, blood or brain cells. 

For the current exhibition, Bleckner examines his own history and the challenges that an artist faces daily: how to distill ideas that are constantly evolving and elliptical? To where does one painting lead? And what becomes of that next painting, if thought but never made? 

Bleckner gives form to relinquished works wih new paintings from his Dome and Architecture of the Sky series. These compositions correlate the grandeur of the unknowable with humankind's outward search for understanding. Paintings such as Brain Rust, Doctor, Mausoleum, and Prayer address this quest inward, incorporating imagery of exclusively human concepts of science (electromagnetic imaging), language (the written word), and beatuy (floral motifs) to suggest that what we choose to worship is integral to spirituality. 

The painting Obituary fittingly provides a coda for the show. Here, over a collage of death notices culled from The New York Times, Bleckner has painted what appears to be an array of individual small canvases. The shifts in stylistic approach reveal the thought process of the artist, coping with finite time to express multiple ideas through painting.

*image (left)
Ross Bleckner
Doctor (Dr. Donald Kaplan), 2013
oil/linen, 84" x 60"
courtesy of the artist and Mary Boone Gallery