With a presentation in all of the outer rooms, Neues Museum presents the painter Ross Bleckner (born 1949), an artist who confidently deploys a wide range of expressive options, accepting no dividing line between figurative and non-figurative.
Bleckner’s art seems to constantly reinvent itself, speaking again and again of the fragility of existence and the human desire for a metaphysical vanishing point behind the world. Death is everywhere in his oeuvre, where it is married with beauty. Pictures of flowers or human cells, transformed by the artist into glowing lanterns, explore a terrain between biology, psychology and identity.
When letters appear almost imperceptibly between the stripes on one picture, spelling out the words "Remember Them", then this epitaph relates to the disease that is one of Bleckner’s long-term concerns – AIDS. Two paintings that constitute a striking memorial to the victims of AIDS, in the form of domed skies recalling Schinkel’s stage set for The Magic Flute, will also be on show in Nuremberg.
This encounter with a major painter of the present has been made possible by loans from the Rafael & Teresa Jablonka Collection.