Puccio Gallery

ROSS BLECKNER was born on May 12, 1949, in New York and grew up in Hewlett Harbor on Long Island. The first art exhibition he saw — The Responsive Eye, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1965 — had a strong impact upon him. Bleckner studied with Sol LeWitt and Chuck Close at New York University, where he earned a B.A. in 1971. Two years later, he completed an M.F.A. at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, where he met David Salle. After moving back to New York, Bleckner purchased and moved into a Tribeca loft building in 1974 where he continued to paint. In 1984, Bleckner’s art attracted a burst of attention when he had a single large painting on view at Nature Morte in the East Village. Bleckner quickly attracted the attention of gallery owners and collectors.

Bleckner’s first solo museum exhibition was organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1988. His work has since been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including a midcareer retrospective organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1995. He has been represented in many group exhibitions devoted to abstraction, among other themes, as well as the Whitney Biennial (1975, 1987, and 1989), Biennale of Sydney (1988), and Carnegie International (1988). He continues to live and work in New York and Sagaponack.  He is the youngest artist ever to have a solo exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.