Press release

Baldwin Gallery is proud to present its fifth show with painter Ross Bleckner. Famously, Bleckner’s work mines the fleeting connections that unite the spiritual with the biochemical. Bleckner has long employed flowers to sing of the ephemerality of life and beauty: brief flames against the void. Profoundly, deliberately, beautiful, in the new work presented here, Bleckner further deepens the universality of his themes with arguably the most recognizable art historical iconography in western culture. Bleckner’s black-Giverny conjures darker narratives: an ‘elegant goth Lolita’ rendition, that turns our desirings back upon themselves, evanescent cells and souls and synaptical firings. We are drawn like moths to the firmament fireworks of our ultimate infinity.

Ross Bleckner is originally from Long Island, NY, and received his bachelor’s degree from New York University and his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. Bleckner was and still is the youngest artist to have been given a solo exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, and has since received recognition and distinction throughout the art world, showing at prominent museums and galleries worldwide.

Also showing at Baldwin Gallery is our second show with Los Angeles artist Mark Licari. Licari’s drawings and works on paper pulse with expressionistic energy, infusing artifacts of the everyday with an edgy intensity. Licari’s work frequently celebrates the individual’s heroic defiance of an absurd contemporary pastoral. The things you own end up owning you.

Mark Licari was born in 1975 in Atlanta, GA. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, and received his MFA from University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA. Recent exhibitions include: Clay Center for the Arts and Sciences of West Virginia: Charleston, WV, Museum of Fine Arts: Ghent, Belgium, Museum of Contemporary Art: Jacksonville, FL, and Monterey Museum of Art: Monterey, CA, as well as public collections in Gemeente Museum: The Hague, Netherlands, Metropolitan Museum of Art: New York, NY, Monterey Museum of Art: Monterey, CA, and Museum of Fine Arts: Ghent, Belgium.

Images are available upon request. Please call 970.920.9797 for further information.