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Lot Essay
‘They [the stripe paintings] brought me to a way of working that has this continuous, pulsating, inner glow that keeps pushing itself. […] I don’t want to me them simply stripe paintings. I want them to be emblematic’ (R. Bleckner, quoted in In the Power of Painting, Zurich 2000, p. 132
Ross Bleckner possessed great self-confidence and an insouciant attitude to modern avant-garde thinking while studying Fine Art at New York University in 1971. New forms of expression such as installation and performance art dominated the artistic world at that time, and painting was practiced almost exclusively within a strict minimalist concept. It was in this context that a group of young artist whose painting would be influential in shaping the art of the 1980s gathered at the Californian Institute of Art: they included Eric Fischl, David Salle and Ross Bleckner. Bleckner’s first solo museum exhibition was held in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and his midcareer retrospective was organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1995.
The Past Tense of Light is an encapsulating example of the new postmodernist art which Bleckner sought to create. By infusing simple coloured shapes or stains into the canvas, the strict, geometric pattern is interrupted and becomes a background. This placement is enhanced by the suggestion of an atmosphere hanging over the bars of black and white. The interaction of soft colour and hard line creates a kind of brightness and depth. The piece’s ambiguous relationship to abstraction and representation is apparent in its references to landscape and clouds as shown by the coloured forms. The painting of stripes, a constant formal factor in Bleckner’s work, are a metaphor for our imprisonment within a wider context, but are also regarded as a quotation from Op Art: an artistic current of the sixties that led to nowhere, a critical commentary on the inability of modernism to produce any answers relevant to our own times. Bleckner describes that ‘They [the stripe paintings] brought me to a way of working that has this continuous, pulsating, inner glow that keeps pushing itself. […] I don’t want to me them simply stripe paintings. I want them to be emblematic’ (R. Bleckner, quoted in In the Power of Painting, Zurich 2000, p. 132). He deliberately engages art historical themes by filling the fictitious spaces of his paintings with high symbolic content and emotional potential, questioning the beginning and the end, life and death, light and darkness, bound up with the desire for order and a yearning for beauty.
Ross Bleckner possessed great self-confidence and an insouciant attitude to modern avant-garde thinking while studying Fine Art at New York University in 1971. New forms of expression such as installation and performance art dominated the artistic world at that time, and painting was practiced almost exclusively within a strict minimalist concept. It was in this context that a group of young artist whose painting would be influential in shaping the art of the 1980s gathered at the Californian Institute of Art: they included Eric Fischl, David Salle and Ross Bleckner. Bleckner’s first solo museum exhibition was held in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and his midcareer retrospective was organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1995.
The Past Tense of Light is an encapsulating example of the new postmodernist art which Bleckner sought to create. By infusing simple coloured shapes or stains into the canvas, the strict, geometric pattern is interrupted and becomes a background. This placement is enhanced by the suggestion of an atmosphere hanging over the bars of black and white. The interaction of soft colour and hard line creates a kind of brightness and depth. The piece’s ambiguous relationship to abstraction and representation is apparent in its references to landscape and clouds as shown by the coloured forms. The painting of stripes, a constant formal factor in Bleckner’s work, are a metaphor for our imprisonment within a wider context, but are also regarded as a quotation from Op Art: an artistic current of the sixties that led to nowhere, a critical commentary on the inability of modernism to produce any answers relevant to our own times. Bleckner describes that ‘They [the stripe paintings] brought me to a way of working that has this continuous, pulsating, inner glow that keeps pushing itself. […] I don’t want to me them simply stripe paintings. I want them to be emblematic’ (R. Bleckner, quoted in In the Power of Painting, Zurich 2000, p. 132). He deliberately engages art historical themes by filling the fictitious spaces of his paintings with high symbolic content and emotional potential, questioning the beginning and the end, life and death, light and darkness, bound up with the desire for order and a yearning for beauty.