ROSS BLECKNER: THE VIEWING ROOM

Petzel is pleased to debut The Viewing Room, a series of presentations and events bringing together artists, curators, and historians in a rare encounter with new and seminal works. The inaugural presentation in this series features new paintings by New York-based artist Ross Bleckner.

March 22 – April 5, 2025

Bleckner presents new works inspired by Cy Twombly’s photographic studies of flowers. Often drawing on reference imagery and studies from influential predecessors, such as Manet’s final bouquet paintings, Bleckner’s use of Twombly’s photographs serves as both an act of remembrance and a testament to the fleeting life cycles of all living things. As Bleckner states, “I am not interested in the flowers, but in the painterly quality of the photographs…I paint flowers like a camera would focus on them.”

At times “taking apart” Twombly’s photographs—zooming in, widening out, catching light—Bleckner builds on longstanding modalities across his oeuvre, having long alternated between the most microbial representations of human sentience, such as blood cells, to the dizzying splendor of the cosmos.

Placing the sensuous, saturated surfaces of Twombly’s photographic experiments in dialogue with the artist’s own symbology of loss, memory, and change, Bleckner’s paintings channel thresholds between states of being.

The Viewing Room series will spotlight specially curated works across media and genre by gallery artists, open to the public for a limited time. The series will continue this spring, with presentations coinciding with programming such as book signings, artist talks, and screenings, featuring artists James Little, Seth Price, and Emily Mae Smith, among others, to be announced.