Dike Blair
1952–

Dike Blair (born 1952) is a New York-based artist, writer and teacher. His art consists of two parallel bodies of work: intimate, photorealistic paintings and installation-like sculptures assembled from common objects—often exhibited together—which examine overlooked and unexceptional phenomena of daily existence in both a romantic and ironic manner. Blair emerged out of the late 1970s New York art scene, and his work relates to concurrent movements such as the Pictures Generation, Minimalism and conceptual art, while remaining distinct from and tangential to them. New York Times critic Roberta Smith places his sculpture in a "blurred category" crossing "Carl Andre with ikebana, formalist abstraction with sleek anonymous hotel rooms, talk-show sets with home furnishings showrooms." Cameron Martin writes in Artforum that the paintings are "rendered with a lucidity that extracts something metaphysical from the mundane."