John Baldessari
John Baldessari is a key influential figure from the generation of artists who emerged in the mid 60s. Through his early experiments with phototext canvases, his conceptually-rich video art work of the early 70s, and his distinctive photo collages and installations of the 80s, Baldessari helped define and shape the landscape of contemporary art. Initially trained as a painter, Baldessaris practice evolved through fusing the narrative potency of imagery with the conceptual charge of text and language. The combination of these elements served to rework the boundaries of art while creating a corpus of work that incisively interrogates the nature of communication. Baldessari has been featured in over 200 solo exhibitions and in over 100 group exhibitions throughout North America and Europe. He has received prestigious accolades including the Americans for the Arts Lifetime Achievement Award and the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, awarded by La Biennale di Venezia in 2009. He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and American Academy of Arts and Letters.
involved in:
do it
do it is the longest-running and most far-reaching exhibition to ever happen, giving new meaning to the concept of the “Exhibition in Progress.” do it takes written instructions by artists as a point of departure, which can be interpreted anew each time they are enacted.
read more »State of Mind: New California Art Circa 1970
State of Mind is a deep investigation of seminal conceptual and related avant-garde activities in the late 1960s and early 1970s and the critical interchange between artists living in California.
read more »Acceptable Entertainment
Acceptable Entertainment presents a selection of photographs by twenty-six contemporary artists who are involved with both the imagery and institution of television. Ranging from the poetic to the political, their photographs repackage the fragments of broadcast images brought daily into our living rooms.
read more »Critiques of Pure Abstraction
Critiques of Pure Abstraction presents the work of 20 artists who practice various forms of pure abstraction.
read more »Contemporary Illustrated Books: Word and Image, 1976-1988
The arts of the book offer an infinite variety of delights to the eye and intellect. This exhibition provides a rare opportunity to see great books, illustrated by modern masters, removed from locked museum, library, and collectors cabinets, and presented in the expansive manner they deserve. Often lavish and iconoclastic, these volumes invite an intimacy […]
read more »Verbally Charged Images
Verbally Charged Images demonstrates how text can be used to alter ones perception or preconceptions of the visual image by providing a subjective framework, thus reversing the traditional image-text relationship in which the image illustrates the text. Although the mode of rhetoric varies from work to work, as does the location of the text in […]
read more »VIDEOART U.S.A.
VIDEOART U.S.A. was born out of a grand-scale erudite and historical study of international contemporary video art. In the present decade it has become increasingly clear that video art extends beyond a new technology designed to please the human eye. It is rather used as a tool to explore the most pressing issues in contemporary […]
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