ART CITIES:Los Angeles -John Baldessari

 

Initially trained as a painter, John Baldessari began experimenting with text and photography and incorporating them into his work in the mid ‘60s, evolving his practice through the ‘70s into printmaking, film, sculpture and installation. Baldessari has developed a body of work that demonstrates and discloses the narrative potential of images and their associative power with text and language.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Sprüth Magers Gallery Archive

For almost 50 years, John Baldessari has numbered among the most important figures of Contemporary Art. His uninhibited and tabooless perspective onto art and the world in which it arises, along with his ambivalent attitude toward painting, Concept Art, and Appropriation Art, have had an enduring influence on several generations of visual artists, from David Salle and Jack Goldstein to Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger. For its inaugural exhibition, Sprüth Magers Gallery couldn’t have selected a more Los Angeles-appropriate artist, John Baldessari, he is an important figure in the art world, and he is a teacher in a number of California institutions for 30 years. Also as a part of the group of artists who started the West Coast Modernist scene in the ‘50s and ‘60s, John Baldessari is an obvious choice for Sprüth Magers’s inaugural exhibition of their new space. John Baldessari has created a new body of work specifically for the exhibition, which consist of a series of banal found photographs, altered with his trademark blocks of rich colour, accompanied by equally banal snippets of text that appear like captions beneath the images. The text is intentionally redundant, and designed to perplex and trigger the viewer to inscribe meaning to the imagery. The arresting disjunction between text and image opens up an enormous gulf for the viewer’s imagination. The picture breaks off from one space into another, with the text offering its own distinct image, creating a double register not unlike counterpoint in a musical composition. The resulting combination of word and image generates a radically anarchic pictorial space. His work invites the viewer to contribute to the meaning of the work.

Info: Sprüth Magers Gallery, 5900 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, Duration: 24/2-9/4/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.spruethmagers.com