#77 MILLION PAINTINGS REVIEW UPDATE#

Divided by Zero (2020) floats colourful, smeared horizontal stripes, seemingly on their way to somewhere, over a greyish void with a glowing white centre that feels about as close as these paintings get to hope. Melancholy unifies the show, counterweighted with acceptance: in the centrepiece four-panel geometric abstraction After/All/ These/Years (2020), concentric grey diamonds are steadily invaded by a single red one, moving from edge to centre, bespeaking ominous transformation over вЂ“ the title suggests вЂ“ a lifetime. ItвЂ™s one of a half-dozen stylistic modalities essayed here.

#77 MILLION PAINTINGS REVIEW UPDATE#

A trio of flower stems heavy with blooms float unassisted like ghosts вЂ“ one blackened, one multicoloured, one vanishing вЂ“ and, to finish, Bleckner has assaulted the canvas with a blowtorch in a vicious, impatient update of the floral memento mori. Here, among the first things one sees is Burn Painting (Rooms Combined to Cheer) (2020), set in a black-tiled space, maybe a shower room. But, as the all-new canvases here demonstrate, Bleckner increasingly conflates human fragility with aesthetics, which means an emphasis on stylistic change. In the 1980s and 90s, Ross Bleckner was the painter-laureate of the AIDS epidemic, and one mightnвЂ™t have been surprised to see his austere semiabstractions of the era, with their references to blood cells, revived to address another era of contagion. Ross Bleckner, Untitled, 2019, oil on linen, 77 x 77 cm.

77 million paintings review