Overview

By combining and colliding the unexpected, the US artist John Baldessari, born 1931, creates conceptual works that raise questions regarding what art is, how art is made, and what art can look like. After concluding in the 1960s that a photographic image or a text were more adequate expressions of his artistic intentions than painting, John Baldessari's practice took a new direction. Since then, Baldessari has combined subjects from the imagery of popular culture with linguistic examinations, creating works that challenge artistic norms and boundaries. This catalogue, published to accompany the exhibition at Moderna Museet, Stockholm, spans Baldessari's entire career and shows the breadth of his artistic practice: you will encounter paintings, photographs, the moving images and the traces of performative acts. The book also includes a wide selection of Baldessari's own writings from 1968-2011.

Full Product Details

9783960987956

Table of Contents

Reviews

I'm not being purposely humorous. I do think the world is absurd, said the late American artist John Baldessari, who worked prolifically until his death in January at the age of 88. Baldessari's irreverent approach to the conventions of art saw him become one of the most influential practitioners of the late 20th century, his work placing focus on the narrative potential of imagery. A forthcoming exhibition in Stockholm is the largest survey of the artist in Sweden to date, and will include film, photography, sculpture, prints and painting, exploring the indelible impact Baldessari left on the world of art.-- AnOther By combining and colliding the unexpected, the US artist John Baldessari (1931-2020), created conceptual works that raise questions regarding what art is, how art is made, and what art can look like[...] Baldessari has combined subjects from the imagery of popular culture with linguistic examinations, creating works that challenge artistic norms and boundaries.-- Wall Street International For over five decades, John Baldessari (1931-2020) explored the relationship between text and image and what emerges when the two are brought together. His conceptual artworks often have an underlying streak of humour and irony. The exhibition spans Baldessari's entire career and shows the breadth of his artistic practice: you will encounter paintings, photographs, the moving images and the traces of performative acts-- Moderna Museet John Baldessari has been of immense importance to Conceptual Art - says Matilda Olof-Ors, the exhibition's curator. With an underlying streak of humor and irony, he time and again challenged the prevailing norms and notions of what art is .-- ITSLIQUID This is the first Swedish survey of work by John Baldessari, who died earlier this year. It explores how the American artist abandoned painting in the 1960s, instead making use of photographs and text cribbed from popular and academic sources to create provocative and irreverent works.-- Apollo

Author Information

John Baldessari is best known for his conceptual works that focus on the processes of choice and selection, and that employ a wide range of what were in the beginning of his career non-traditional mediums: photographs, words, texts. In his word paintings from the 1960s, he poses questions about the nature of art - what it is, what it is not, what it looks like, etc. In addition, Baldessari's status as a teacher in Los Angeles is unparalleled also in relation to his understanding that teaching and making art are directly related in their mutual reliance upon a combination of the visual and the verbal to convey ideas through telling stories. Matilda Olof-Ors is an assistant curator at Moderna Museet, Stockholm.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available