Ross Bleckner – Octopus

An exhibition of new paintings by Ross Bleckner that reflects the intuitive, associative process at the core of the artist's practice. About Petzel is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by Ross Bleckner, opening September 17 and running through October 24, 2026, at 520 West 25th Street. This marks the artist's fourth solo exhibition with the gallery and features a new body of work that reflects the intuitive, associative process at the core of Bleckner's practice. Rather than beginning with a fixed subject or predetermined narrative, Bleckner approaches painting as an open-ended sequence of discoveries. Images collected over years (photographs saved from newspapers, books, magazines, the internet, and his own daily life) accumulate, not as references to be reproduced faithfully but material to be played with, revisited and transformed in the unexpected formal relationships that emerge. Each painting becomes the point of departure for the next, as ideas mutate, dissolve and reappear through the act of painting itself. Working in this way, Bleckner treats the studio as a site of continual improvisation. Images drift between recognition and abstraction while motifs are repeated, layered and reconfigured until their origins become almost impossible to locate. Rather than illustrating a single idea, the paintings unfold as a stream of visual consciousness, where intuition and association guide each successive mark. The works in the exhibition exemplify this fluid movement between observation and invention. In Medicine Cabinet (2025), a network of biomorphic forms and branching red lines spreads across the canvas like an anatomical diagram, vascular system, or cellular structure, never settling into a single image. Rather than depicting an object, the painting unfolds as an evolving web of associations, where interior and exterior, body and architecture remain in constant flux. Delicate pink linear structures in Where Is My Body (2025) float across luminous blue and white planes, suggesting molecular diagrams, crystalline lattices, or microscopic views that continually shift between abstraction and recognition. In The Dancers (2026), translucent bodies emerge gradually from sweeping gestures of paint, their limbs folding into one another until movement itself becomes the subject. Figures materialize through overlapping layers and shifting contours, as if generated through the very act of painting rather than described by it. Ross Bleckner (b. 1949, Brooklyn, NY) lives and works in New York. His work has been the subject of numerous museum exhibitions, including major retrospectives at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Moderna Museet, Stockholm. His paintings are included in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Tate, London; the Art Institute of Chicago; and numerous other institutions worldwide. Read more Toggle Painting