Details
Ross Bleckner (b. 1949)
Chamber
signed, titled and dated '"CHAMBER" Ross Bleckner 1985' (on the reverse)
oil on linen
88 x 60 in. (223.5 x 152.4 cm.)
Painted in 1985.
Provenance
Mary Boone Gallery, New York
Literature
S. Westfall, "Ross Bleckner at Mary Boone," Art in America, May 1986, pp. 155-157 (illustrated).
R. Milazzo, The Paintings of Ross Bleckner, Brussels, 2006, pp. 73 and 284 (illustrated).
Exhibited
New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Ross Bleckner, March-May 1995, n.p. (illustrated).

Lot Essay

"Chamber is the most consummate of Bleckner's Chandelier Paintings. It was made in 1985.... It is a perfect blending of internal and external space, in which the interior 'space' of the chandelier and all that it represents-the 'light' of culture, civilization, consciousness, and pure reflection-and the exterior space of the Weather paintings and all that it represented-the 'darkness' of nature and the psyche or the subconscious, the elemental and subliminal, the visceral and the sublime-are effectively conflated. Chandeliers and the fragments of chandeliers, as well as their extensive reflections, animate a deep, dark, viscous, black ground with an underlying blue-gray tone that seeps through to the forms to create various penumbrae around them. A haunting, and seemingly haunted, hybrid, interior/exterior space is created that mourns the universe even as it reinvents it."
(R. Milazzo, The Paintings of Ross Bleckner, Brussels, 2006, p. 77)

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