News — aids

If you want to understand how painting survived — and mattered — through the AIDS crisis, the culture wars of the 1980s, and the long shadow of Conceptualism, you have to look at Ross Bleckner. By the late 1970s, plenty of critics had declared painting dead, eclipsed by Minimalism and Conceptual art. Bleckner, trained at NYU alongside Sol LeWitt and Chuck Close and later at CalArts, didn't just keep painting — he made a case for why it still needed to exist. His early striped and geometric works absorbed the vocabulary of Op Art and hard-edge abstraction, but he pushed...