Ross Bleckner: Octopus at Petzel

Ross Bleckner's new paintings are on view at Petzel, 520 West 25th Street in Chelsea, from September 17 through October 24, 2026. Titled Octopus, the show is the artist's fourth solo exhibition with the gallery.

Bleckner was born in Brooklyn in 1949 and lives and works in New York. His work has been the subject of major retrospectives at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. His paintings are held in collections including The Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Tate and the Art Institute of Chicago.

The new works grow out of an intuitive, associative way of painting. Bleckner starts without a fixed subject or story. Over the years he has gathered photographs from newspapers, books, magazines, the internet and his own daily life, and he treats them as material to play with rather than images to reproduce. Each canvas becomes the starting point for the next. Motifs are repeated, layered and rearranged until their origins are hard to find, and images drift between recognition and abstraction. The studio operates as a place of constant improvisation, and the paintings read as a stream of visual consciousness.

Several works show this movement between observation and invention. In Medicine Cabinet (2025), biomorphic forms and branching red lines spread across the canvas like an anatomical diagram, a vascular system or a cellular structure, without settling into one image. Where Is My Body (2025) sets delicate pink linear structures over luminous blue and white planes, suggesting molecular diagrams, crystal lattices or microscopic views. In The Dancers (2026), translucent bodies emerge slowly from sweeping gestures of paint, their limbs folding into one another until movement becomes the subject.

Other works on view include Alone With Everyone, Two Chests and a Brain II and Rest (K.M.), all from 2026. All are oil on linen or canvas, and the largest measure 84 inches (about 213 cm) on a side. The gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.