ROSS BLECKNER

On view from March 22 through April 5, 2025, Bleckner will present new works inspired by Cy Twombly’s photographic studies of flowers. Often drawing on reference imagery and studies from influential predecessors, such as Manet’s final bouquet paintings, Bleckner’s use of Twombly’s photographs serves as both an act of remembrance and a testament to the fleeting life cycles of all living things. As Bleckner states, ‘I am not interested in the flowers, but in the painterly quality of the photographs...I paint flowers like a camera would focus on them.’

At times ‘taking apart’ Twombly’s photographs—zooming in, widening out, catching light—Bleckner builds on longstanding modalities across his oeuvre, having long alternated between the most microbial representations of human sentience, such as blood cells, to the dizzying splendour of the cosmos. Placing the sensuous, saturated surfaces of Twombly’s photographic experiments in dialogue with the artist’s own symbology of loss, memory, and change, Bleckner’s paintings channel thresholds between states of being.

Coinciding with this presentation, Bleckner will be joined in conversation with writer and curator Jarrett Earnest, on Saturday, March 29, 2025, at 4pm. RSVP is required as space is limited; please write to press@petzel.com to reserve your seat.

The Viewing Room series will spotlight specially curated works across media and genre by gallery artists, open to the public for a limited time. The series will continue this spring, with presentations coinciding with programming such as book signings, artist talks, and screenings, featuring artists James Little, Seth Price, and Emily Mae Smith, among others, to be announced.

About Ross Bleckner****

Emerging as a prominent artist in New York during the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, Bleckner’s paintings are an investigation of change, loss, and memory, often suggesting meditations on the body, health and disease, much like a memento mori. Bleckner’s work considers the body as a fragile membrane, perfect until imperfect, just barely separated from disaster. His immersive paintings, whether pure abstraction of stripes or dots, or more representational renderings of birds, flowers, and brains, elicit a powerful hypnotic and dizzying effect.

Bleckner is the youngest artist to receive a midcareer retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, at the age of 45. His paintings can be found in many major museums, such as the Museum of Modern Art and in the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, as well as numerous exhibitions, including at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin; Reina Sofia, Madrid; L.A. County Museum, Los Angeles; Kunstmuseum Luzern, Luzern; and Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern.