Ross Bleckner is an influential contemporary American artist. Perhaps best known for his paintings dealing with loss and memory, Bleckner notably tackled the emotional toll brought by the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. “Life is short. Life goes fast,” he has said. “And what I really want to do in my life is to bring something new, something beautiful and something filled with light into the world.” His poetic works often employ recurring symbolic imagery, such as candelabras, doves, and flowers, rendered with a blurred, glowing sense of light. Born on May 12, 1949 in New York, NY, he went on to study first at New York University alongside the artists Sol Lewitt and Chuck Close, and then at the California Institute of the Arts where he received his...