Accompanying the fourth exhibition of the artist’s paintings at Galleria Mazzoli, Ross Bleckner: New Paintings 2022-2025, in Modena, from June 7 through September 2025, curated by Richard Milazzo, is this monograph, Outside Our Window: The Recent Paintings of Ross Bleckner, 2018-2025, written by the curator. Outside Our Window documents the works the artist has produced since his last monograph, The Corner of the Room: Paintings of the 1970s, which also included the work from 2011 to the beginning of 2018.
Outside Our Window takes off where The Corner of the Room left off in 2018, and constitutes effectively the fourth volume of a 4-volume monograph on Ross Bleckner’s work. The first volume, The Paintings of Ross Bleckner, was published in Belgium in 2007; the second, The Flower Paintings of Ross Bleckner, was issued in 2011; the third, The Corner of the Room, in 2018; and this, the fourth volume, Outside Our Window: The Recent Paintings of Ross Bleckner, 2018-2025, in 2025 – the latter three, published by Galleria Mazzoli.
Besides the works in this show, Outside Our Window documents the works Bleckner produced from 2018 to the present. Which includes the continuation and expansion of the ‘language’ of several seminal series: the Monet Paintings; the Burn Paintings; the Paintings Based on Photographs by Cy Twombly; an extensive development of the Faded Figure Paintings; and the creation of the Disintegration / Regeneration (or Reintegration) Paintings, based on the artist’s always controversial floral imagery. The monograph attempts to answer the questions: if Bleckner is not painting flowers, or just flowers, then what is he painting? And if the work is not purely subjective, then precisely how are the subjects of his paintings objective? Temporality, or, more precisely, mortality, are at the heart of the answers the artists gives and which the author attempts to unfold extensively in a painting by painting, year by year, analysis of the work.
The author uses as the central trope of this monograph, which as a whole endeavors to explicate Bleckner’s paintings of the last eight years (from 2018 to 2025), three of the artist’s works: Outside His Window, Outside Her Window, and Outside Their Window. In doing so, he shows how the 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. By extenuating the pronominal logic of the artist’s existential linguistic chain of titles – his / her / their –, he arrives at our window. He ravels and unravels Bleckner’s images, and the perspective they proffer, 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. By implication, the author addresses the illusions of the eternal moment perpetuated by technology. He shows how Bleckner’s titles alone tell a story, narrate the discursive dimension of the paintings, even as he forges with the greatest lyrical intensity the vectors of their abstract imagery: The Centuries; When You Think You Have Nothing; Grid of the Lost Tree; Rooms Combined to Cheer; Love and Letting Go; Divided by Zero; Out of It Steps Our Future; The World These Days; Flowers Change Their Bodies; Visible Becoming Invisible; A Year of Negative Thinking; Cheer Up Brother; Brain Future; Breathe Deeply; When You’re Not Here; A Year of Conquering Negative Thinking; I Went to the Forest to Look for a Sign; Faded in Front of Me; Hide Inside the Flower; Advice for Starting Over; You’re Somebody Else; Watching from Outside; What is the Grass; One Common Box; You Will Not ‘Get Over It’; Training for Happiness; Waves of Evolution; Always Never Be; Day and Night, Hour by Hour; It’s Gone Gone; Never There When You Stare; Two Meet Again; Everything for The Last Time; When There Is No Outside; The Between Life; The Secret Heart; Can You See Me; A Day Doesn’t Pass; Touch and Go; Sunset. All of this, Bleckner broadcasts, because he knows, we can only “watch from outside.” Because we must know this, our time, is “the time of silver rain” – perhaps “when there is no outside,” and no inside, as well.
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.”
Ross Bleckner has had one-person exhibitions in many of the major museums and galleries in the world, including a retrospective at the Guggenheim in New York in 1995. Outside Our Window: The Recent Paintings of Ross Bleckner, 2018-2025 is the fourth of four monographs written by Richard Milazzo on the artist’s works. And published by Galleria Mazzoli. The Paintings of Ross Bleckner came out in Brussels in 2007; The Flower Paintings of Ross Bleckner and The Corner of the Room: Ross Bleckner’s Paintings of the 1970s were issued by Galleria Mazzoli, Modena, in 2011 and 2018, respectively. Ross Bleckner’s Examined Life: Writings, 1972-2007, was published by Edgewise Press in 2009. His work is represented by the Petzel Gallery in New York.
