Frederic Tuten & Ross Bleckner | Nine Flowers

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Frederic Tuten & Ross Bleckner
Nine Flowers, Print: 2017, Book: 2019
Screenprint & artist’s book
Limited to 100 copies and 26 copies, lettered A-Z signed by the author and the artist
$350 (Book only)
$3,500 (Book & Print)

The sights and smells of the historic Flower District continue to inspire Planthouse projects. The gallery is pleased to announce the publication of a new limited edition artist book, Nine Flowers, a collaboration between the author Frederic Tuten and the artist Ross Bleckner. Tuten’s ethereal vignettes guide the reader through nine encounters with flowers as weighty subjects throughout his life and around the world, each evoking the mystery and symbolism attached to these temporary living things. Tuten’s texts are accompanied by excerpts from Bleckner’s 7-color screenprint, Untitled. Twenty-six copies of the book, lettered A-Z, include the original screenprint from the edition, signed by the artist. Untitled was printed by Brad Ewing and Marco Lawrence at the Grenfell Press, New York in 2017.

Frederic Tuten grew up in the Bronx and later lived in South America and Paris, where he taught film and literature at the University of Paris 8. He has written about art, literature and film in Art Forum, The New York Times, and Vogue; was an actor in an Alain Resnais movie; taught with Paul Bowles in Morocco; and co-wrote the cult-classic Possession. He has earned three Pushcart Prizes for fiction, an O’Henry Prize for a short story, a PhD in literature, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Award for Distinguished Writing from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is the author of five novels: Tintin in the New World; Tallien: A Brief Romance; Van Gogh’s Bad Café; The Green Hour; and a book of inter-related short stories; Self Portraits: Fictions. His memoir My Young Life was published by Simon & Schuster in March 2019.

Ross Bleckner received a Bachelor of Arts from New York University in 1971, a Master of Fine Arts from Cal Arts in 1973, and has taught at many of the nation’s most prestigious universities. The Solomon R. Guggenheim of Art had a major retrospective of his works in 1995, summarizing two decades of solo shows at internationally acclaimed exhibition venues such as SFMoMA, Contemporary Arts Museum, Stockholm Moderna Museet, and the Carnegie Museum of Art. Works by Bleckner are also held in esteemed public collections throughout the globe, including MoMA, MoCA, Astrup Fearnley, Museo National Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Not only has Mr. Bleckner had a profound impact of shaping the New York art world, his philanthropic efforts have enabled many community organizations to perform their vital work. For ten years Bleckner served as president of AIDS Community Research Initiative of America (ACRIA), a non-profit community-based AIDS research and treatment education center. More recently, he has been working with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime in Northern Uganda to help rehabilitate and raise money for ex-child soldiers. In May 2009, Bleckner was awarded the title of Goodwill Ambassador by the United Nations. Recently exhibitions include Architecture of the Sky at the Bohme Chapel in Cologne, which was a selection of Dome and Architecture of the Sky paintings from 1992 – 2013; Ross Bleckner: Find a Peaceful Place Where You Can Make Plans for the Future at Dallas Contemporary; and Ross Bleckner: Time of Disquiet at Maruani Mercier Gallery in Brussels, Belgium. Ross Bleckner lives in New York City.