Paul Bloodgood (1960 – May 4, 2018) was an American artist and gallery owner who played an iconoclastic role in the New York art world for multiple decades.
Bloodgood produced predominantly abstract paintings, often relating to the works of earlier artists from Jackson Pollock to Paul Cézanne.
He co-founded the AC Project Room in Lower Manhattan and held solo exhibitions in several US cities, including New York, San Francisco, and Washington D.C., and at the Andreas Binder Gallery in Germany.
[2] He taught painting at Rutgers University, Cooper Union, and the Savannah College of Art, and was a recipient of multiple awards, including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 2009.
A 2012 Art in America review of his second solo show at the Newman Popiashvili Gallery described Objects in Pieces (2011) as having "a sense of being in the thick of things, a zooming in, as opposed to a deliberate fracturing and arranging.
"[3] It explained that Bloodgood had recently suffered a head injury, the result of a 2010 mugging, "leaving him with an optical disorder that prevents him from recognizing a whole object if he sees only parts of it... the artist has since changed his process and is relying on his impairment, rather than collages, to create his fragmentary abstractions.
"[3] "Standing in front of Bloodgood’s oils," it continued, "one is deeply impressed by the artist’s offbeat perspective and resolute pursuit of his own language.
"[3] From 1989 to 2001, Bloodgood operated AC Project Room, an independent, artist-run commercial gallery, initially on Renwick Avenue, later moving to Broome Street in SoHo, New York, along with Alissa Friedman and fellow artist Anne Chu.
[4] For four years in the early 2000s he worked as a colorist, creating a range of paint colours for Martha Stewart and Lowe's Home Centers based on Paul Klee's color theories from his time at the Bauhaus.
[2][5] Despite being diagnosed with early onset Alzhiemer's disease following the traumatic 2010 brain injury, Bloodgood continued working in his studio until 2017.