Ronald Bladen
Ronald Bladen ( born July 13, 1918 in Vancouver, British Columbia, † February 3, 1988 in New York City, USA ) was an American painter and sculptor. He is considered an important representative of minimalism in sculpture.
Life and work
Bladen was born the son of British immigrants in Vancouver. His parents were socialists, and his mother had studied at the Sorbonne in Paris and was an active member of the suffragette movement in Britain.
From 1937 to 1939 studied Bladen at the Vancouver School of Art, from 1938 in the Art Class by Allen Edwards. In 1939, Bladen moved to San Francisco to continue his studies there. There he met the Mexican painter Diego Rivera. By the year 1943 Bladen studied painting and sculpture at the California School of Fine Arts, later renamed the San Francisco Art Institute and attended evening classes at the school until 1945.
Ronald Bladen had close contact with contemporary American writers (for example, Allen Ginsberg ) and became in 1945 a member of the Libertarian Circle, a group of anarchist- pacifist artists around the writer Kenneth Rexroth ( 1905-1982 ). In 1951, Bladen American citizen was. Bladen remained in the United States and moved in 1956 to New York.
In 1946, Bladen had his first solo exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery. He painted in the style of abstract expressionism, with intensely colored spots in organic forms, abbildeten the landscape similar paintings.
In 1962 he exhibited his first painted plywood - reliefs in the gallery Brata and the Green Gallery in New York. In the following year, he created his first freestanding, colorful sculptures of plywood with metal struts. From this point on, Bladen devoted himself exclusively to sculpture. In 1964 he showed his first sculpture "White Z" at an exhibition in the Park Place Gallery in New York.
After a major exhibition in 1966 at the Jewish Museum in New York, " Primary Structures Younger American and British Artists " along with Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Walter De Maria, Robert Morris, Tony Smith and Robert Smithson, Ronald Bladen is considered one of the greatest exponents of Minimalism. In 1968 he participated in the documenta 4 in Kassel in the Sculpture Department.
From 1974 to 1976 taught Bladen as a guest lecturer at Columbia University in New York and was from 1976 teacher at the Parsons School of Fine Art, 1981-1982 at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine and 1982-1983 Guest lecturer at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.
Ronald Bladen died in 1988 in New York of cancer.
Prizes and awards
Literature and sources
- Exhibition catalog for Documenta IV: IV documentation. International Exhibition; Catalogue: Volume 1: ( painting and sculpture ); Volume 2: (graphics / objects ); Kassel 1968
- Kimpel, Harald / stem, Karin: documenta IV International Exhibition 1968 - A photographic reconstruction ( Series of the documenta - Archives); Bremen 2007, ISBN 978-3-86108-524-9