Ross Bleckner
"Flowers – Blumen"

The title of this exhibition is both programmatic and misleading. "For a long time, I have been painting flowers repeatedly, but I don't see them as flowers. They have to do with the passage of time and transience," says Ross Bleckner himself about his works with flower motifs.

KiS – Kunst in Seefeld presents oil paintings from the collection of Rafael Jablonka from the years 1995 to 2022. The New York-born Bleckner, who was born in 1949, gained international recognition during the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s when he dealt with the loss of friends and subsequently with the decay of the physical and death in his works.

The process of blooming and withering, the polarity of light and darkness that determine our lives, have since been central themes for the artist, for which he repeatedly takes up the motif of flowers and blossoms. Visual memories of Claude Monet, El Greco, Emil Nolde, or Odilon Redon are awakened – not unjustly, as they are among Bleckner's preferred artists. The superficial beauty of the flowers is important to the artist, or in his words, "beauty is the hook." Beauty as a hook – behind it lies the transience of