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." Blair's work has been shown at the Whitney Museum, Secession (Vienna), Weatherspoon Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, and Centre Pompidou; it belongs to the collections of the Whitney, Brooklyn Museum, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2009 and the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome in 2010. He lives in New York with his wife, costume designer Marie Abma. Work and critical reception Blair's two bodies of work serve as counterpoints and foils for one another in regard to composition, color, texture and theme. His realistic, deadpan paintings (primarily untitled, painted in gouache, and derived from his own snapshots) are more literal, yet illusionistic; the Postminimal, installation-like sculpture is abstract, but concrete and painterly. Together they investigate oppositions and liminal spaces—between nature and architecture, inside and outside, fullness and emptiness—and themes including pleasure and boredom, escapism and transcendence, and the intersection of designed environments, mass experience and desire. Blair's earlier gouaches focus on diaristic, largely American scenes (bedside set-ups, cocktails, cigarette butt-littered ashtrays, soda cans, VHS tapes) and anodyne transitory environments (motels, lounges, lobbies, Las Vegas, Disneyland) that Roberta Smith characterizes as background and details at "the edges of a sophisticated, travel-weary terrain." Village Voice critic Jerry Saltz writes that the paintings combine "a draftsman's attention to fact, a botanist's eye for type, and a detective's feel for telling clues," resulting in a no-man's-land genre "between illustration, photography, and forensic science." He likens the paintings to work by Richard Prince and Vija Celmins, while others make comparisons to the light and illusionism