Ross Bleckner, born 1949, 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. At the age of 16 in 1965, he saw the influential exhibition The Responsive Eye, at MoMA in New York. The experience came to have a huge impacts on Bleckner’s artistic ambitions and later work. He held his first exhibition in 1975 at Cunningham Ward Gallery in New York, and in 1979 he initiated what was to become a long association with the Mary Boone Gallery in New York.  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 with numerous exhibitions, including at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin; Reina Sofia, Madrid; L.A. County Museum, Los Angeles; Kunstmuseum Luzern, Luzern; and Zentrum Paul Klee, Ber, among a few.

Ross Bleckner is perhaps best known for his paintings dealing with loss and memory, life and the fragility of life. Over the last fifty years, Bleckner has chronicled his own continual search for truth and beauty through an ever-suggestive language of variety and vision. Famously, Bleckner’s work mines the fleeting connections that unite the spiritual with the biochemical. Bleckner has long employed flowers to sing of the ephemetality of life and beauty.

”Life is short, life is fast” he has said and, “What I really want to do in my life is to bring something new, something beautiful and something filled with light into this world.”

Ross Bleckner's large-scale, almost-cosmic semi abstract paintings came to define a certain aesthetic era in New York in the 1980s and ’90s.

In the early 1990s, he made his first Cell paintings, which make reference to diseased human cells, and his circular dot paintings, which serve as both activism and tribute to the disastrous impact of the AIDS epidemic on New York's gay community. From that time, he has continued to paint aspects of the body viewed at the microscopic level, including forms related to DNA and cells.

Ross Bleckner joined in 2009 the UNODC as a goodwill Ambassador and the International Criminal Court’s Trust Fund for Victims on an official mission to Gulu, assisting in the rehabilitation of former child soldiers and abducted girls through art therapy. Bleckner was appointed to spearhead the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNDOC) “Blue Heart” campaign against human trafficking. Through his “extraordinary commitment to the plight of trafficking victims he helped in engaging people to take action against modern day slavery.”

Bleckner currently lives and works in New York City.