New Paintings, 2022-2025

Galleria Mazzoli in Modena, Italy, is pleased to announce the exhibition Ross Bleckner: New Paintings, 2022-2025, from June 7 through September 13, 2025, the American artist’s fourth exhibition in Modena.

The exhibition will feature 15 large-scale artworks crafted by the artist between 2022 and 2025. While flowers appear to be the central subject of the works on display, this is merely a surface impression. If these are not, in fact, paintings of flowers, then what are they?
Bleckner continues to expand the visual language of several of the most significant series in his artistic production: the Monet Paintings, the Burn Paintings, the Paintings Based on Photographs by Cy Twombly, and the Faded Figure Paintings, all of which draw upon the artist’s complex and often controversial floral imagery. The curator, Richard Milazzo, seeks to address these questions in the monograph that accompanies the exhibition: “If Bleckner is not painting flowers—or just flowers—then what is he painting? And if the artwork is not purely subjective, then precisely how are the subjects of his paintings objective? Temporality, or more precisely mortality, emerges as the heart in the artist’s response to these questions.”
The author demonstrates how “his work has circulated not only around personal loss but around suffering as the abiding condition of humanity, death as an inescapable reality transcending our plight, and the deterioration and ultimate abandonment, and perhaps the death, of the soul, or the spirtual status of the soul in our culture in general”. The author both ravels and unravels Bleckner’s imagery and the perspective it proffers, in such a way as to show how the artist’s work is predicated crucially upon “common ground, on finding, confronting, and, at times, even celebrating, that ground, our commonality, and, indeed, what we all have in common with Nature: its inevitable deterioration, decay, and death, but also its seasonal resurgence. Bleckner’s works tell a story, narrate the discursive dimension of his vision, even as he forges with the greatest lyrical intensity the vectors of their abstract imagery.”
Ultimately, what Ross Bleckner is showing us, in each of his paintings, is that “neither end of the spectrum is enduring, neither the inside nor the outside. What is enduring, indeed, endlessly persistent, is the process of transformation.”

Outside Our Window: The Recent Paintings of Ross Bleckner, 2018-2025, the monograph written by Richard Milazzo and published by Galleria Mazzoli, accompanies the exhibition and it documents the works the artist has produced since his last monograph, The Corner of the Room: Paintings of the 1970s, which also included the works from 2011 to the beginning of 2018. Outside Our Window takes off where The Corner of the Room left off in 2018 and it constitutes effectively the fourth volume of a 4-volume monograph on Ross Bleckner’s work, the latter three, published by Galleria Mazzoli.