Ross Bleckner Livres

Ross Bleckner, well-known for his large-scale canvases, has for years used watercolor as both a means and an end to painting. While Bleckners works in oil deal primarily with remembrance and lossoperating as memento mori to those lost in crisisthe watercolors are far more iconic, symbolic of transformation and transcendence. The watercolors, instructive in understanding the larger oil on canvas pictures, also possess a photographic qualitytheir brightness and shimmering surfaces attest to this artists mastery and technique. These precious gems hold up on their own as a major part of Bleckners oeuvre, yet they are relatively unknown. Beautifully reproduced, the sixty images selected here reveal the depth of Bleckners talent and the degree to which this work relates to the artists other paintings.

Time and again in recent decades, art world denizens have celebrated or mourned the demise and subsequent resurgence of painting. In the Power of Painting invites you to take a look at painting above and beyond the rather tiresome modernist myth of the end of painting. It proposes to consider the challenges and problems facing painters in the age of photography not as an omen of painting's eventual final exhaustion, but rather as a source of its lasting vitality. In the Power of Painting traces how six seminal postwar artists-Andy Warhol, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Cy Twombly, Brice Marden, and Ross Bleckner-developed their signature approach to painting in response to the art form's perceived crisis. The six groups of works from the Daros collection impressively demonstrate how these painters re-wrote the rules of painting, from their initial experimenting to the canvases that heralded their maturity. A handsome and splendidly reproduced book, indispensable for all those looking for ways out of the restrictions and limitations of modernist and postmodernist approaches to art.

Verder in dit nummer: Rudi Molacek, Adrian Schiess, Rachel Whiteread.