About the artist
b. 1931 in National City, California, USA
d. 2020 in Los Angeles, California, USA
Initially trained as a painter, Baldessari began experimenting with text and photography and incorporating them into his work in the mid-1960s, evolving his practice through the 1970s into printmaking, film, books, sculpture and installation. He developed a body of work that demonstrated and disclosed the narrative potential of images and their associative power with text and language. Considered one of the founders of conceptual art, John Baldessari was a hugely innovative force in contemporary art. His use of appropriation, erasure, alteration, and montage to disrupt a narrative or to construct an entirely new meaning out of recombined fragments has been utilised in disparate ways in different bodies of works spanning his career.
Exhibitions
Selected works
Publications
John Baldessari
Nose Peak
It should be said that Baldessari’s penchant for depicting noses in his work extends as far back as 1965 with the conception of “God Nose”, one of the artist’s very few pre-1965 paintings to have survived. Here, with his onestar press edition, Baldessari conceives a book about a nose, with a nose, wherein the artist’s famed subject appears and disappears upon a series of pages, in one fluid sweep.
Publisher: Onestar Press
Year: 2015
Language: English
Dimensions: 23 x 14 cm
Pages: 126
Softcover
John Baldessari
The Prima Facie Series
Publisher: Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens
Year: 2006
Language: English
Dimensions: 32 x 22 x 0,4 cm
Pages: 54
Softcover
Since the mid-1960s, John Baldessari (° 1931 National City) has been regarded as one of the most influential artists in the United States. Unlike most American artists who moved to New York, Baldessari continued to live in Los Angeles. As a result, his work can also be read as a personal approach to West Coast glamor.
With his videos, photographs, installations and collages, he was one of the founders of conceptual art. In his work he investigates the perception, meaning and interpretation of things in an ironic way. He repeatedly asks himself how you can influence the reading of an image so that an ambiguous interpretation becomes possible.
This oeuvre catalog of ‘Prima Facie’ has been published on the occasion of the exhibition at the Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens from 17/09/2006 to 03/12/2006.