Stephen Dean - Watercolors & Videos    Mar 13 - Apr 13, 2009

The Baldwin Gallery is proud to present its fourth show with the internationally acclaimed painter Ross Bleckner. Famously, Bleckner’s work tautologically investigates the ephemeral – creation and destruction, change and loss – in an abstract form. His use of flowers as imagery and symbolism, reemerge in his new works with amplified expressionism. Bleckner’s flowers potently and poignantly lament in simple yet complex compositions. There is an earnest profundity to these works, which are thickly layered and muddled against black and white background. Bleckner’s work explores and brings to light the truths about humanity, both beautiful and bleak, in an affecting manner.

Bleckner is from Long Island, New York and received his bachelor degree from New York University and his masters of fine arts from the California Institute of the Arts. Bleckner went on to be the youngest artist to have a solo exhibition at the Guggenheim in New York and since, has experienced exceptional recognition and distinction throughout the art world, showing at prominent museums and galleries around the world.

Also showing at the Baldwin Gallery is New York artist Stephen Dean for the second time. Dean continues to pursue structures and patterns of color through new watercolors and videos. For a number of years, he has extracted colors from familiar objects and scrambled their formal relationship. Newspaper advertisements, ladders, shirts, targets, books and other sculptural objects become compositions of color, form and texture in unexpected artistic expressions. Dean will be exhibiting a new series of watercolors that are based on weather systems and crossword puzzles. He will also be presenting a series of videos made with thermal cameras called "The Color of Fever.” These videos, which are mounted and display gradients of temperature differences focusing on human activity and movement which are translated through a color palette. These videos are mounted and framed like watercolors.

Stephen Dean was born in 1968. He currently lives and works in New York. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art exhibited his work in 2008, in a two-person show titled 'Double Vision'. In 2006 he exhibited at the Site Santa Fe Biennial, and the Miami Art Museum. His work was included in the 51st Venice Biennial (2005.) In 2004 he was awarded the Franco-Spanish Prix Altadis. His work is held in many private, corporate, and public collections, including: the Guggenheim Museum; the Whitney Museum; National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; Yale University Art Gallery; Israel Museum, Tel Aviv; the Fonds National d'Art Contemporain; La Caixa, Barcelona; and the Progressive Corporation.

The public is invited to meet the artists at the opening.

Images are available upon request. Please call 970.920.9797 for further information.

Since 1994, the Baldwin Gallery has been presenting new work by established artists of international renown. In that time, the gallery has earned a reputation as an important venue for contemporary art.

Gallery hours are Monday through Saturday, 10 am to 6 pm, and Sunday from Noon to 5 pm. The Baldwin Gallery is located at 209 South Galena Street in Aspen, Colorado.