Born in New York City in 1949, Ross Bleckner enrolled at CalArts in 1972 at the urging of Chuck Close, his teacher at NYU.

Despite the emphasis on experimental media there, Bleckner found his expression in oil painting. He became one of the first artists to join the Mary Boone Gallery when it opened in 1978.

In 1995, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York honored Ross Bleckner with a mid-career retrospective.

Often addressing themes of remembrance, loss, and transcendence, his work is exhibited in major museums and group and solo shows throughout the world.

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Ross Bleckner Bio:
Ross Bleckner’s immersive, large-scale paintings elicit a powerful hypnotic, dizzying effect. Whether pure abstraction of stripes or dots or more representational renderings of birds, flowers, and urns, Bleckner’s work recalls Op Art and the obsessive and mysterious luminosity of Yayoi Kusama’s Polka-dot paintings. Smoothly layered on the canvas surface against a darker gray background, his multicolored volumetric circles or “cells” look like droplets of blood or molecules viewed under a microscope. Emerging as a prominent artist in New York during the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, Bleckner’s paintings, like memento mori, often suggest meditations on the body, health, disease, and especially AIDS-related death.

American, b. 1949, New York, New York, based in New York, New York   (https://www.artsy.net/artist/ross-bleckner)

Bridging the Arts is a curated film series co-sponsored by Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts and the Kate. The series features a selection of art films produced by the highly-regarded Checkerboard Film Foundation, Inc. and includes a brief lecture before each film.

Details
Tuesday, May 8, at 5:30 p.m.
at the Kate
300 Main Street, Old Saybrook, CT 06475.
Tickets $15 per film.