ART CITIES:Los Angeles-John Baldessari
One of the greatest artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, John Baldessari made an indelible mark on contemporary art worldwide through his probing works, his innovative approach to various art mediums, his boundary-pushing, transcendent wit and his mentorship to countless artists and friends over the course of his storied career.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Sprüth Magers Gallery Archive
The exhibition “The Space Between” presents the homonymous final painting series by John Baldessari. The thirty paintings on view, which exhibit Baldessari’s characteristic combining of text and image, testify to the artist’s unending urge to question the manner in which we find meaning amid the multitude of signs, symbols and gestures that structure our lives. The series “The Space Between” (all 2019) comprises inkjet prints on canvas that reproduce found imagery overlaid with fields of paint. These brushy passages of white and black acrylic blot out elements of each original scene, and in doing so leave particular people, objects and areas exposed. Below, lines of text bring the eye to elements within this visual network. In “The Space Between Two Cowboys.”, a pair of smiling men dressed in cowboy hats and riding gear rest against two large wagon wheels. A white expanse surrounds them, engulfing the background that presumably once gave them a specific context and—by extension—significance. As our eye shifts between fore- and background, we are left to ponder who these people are and who they smile for, as well as attend to the visual, textual and cultural markers that lead us to read them as “cowboys” to begin with. In other works, rather than obscuring the in-between spaces with paint, Baldessari flips the script and leaves those spaces visible, occluding individual objects instead. His spatial overlays and excisions at once deflect and direct our attention, while also betraying the processes by which we encode and decode the world around us. In several works, the artist drew unexpected objects into his balance of image and text, such as in “The Space Between Two Legs.” and “The Space Between Head and Edge.” though their titles and captions reference mundane objects, their imagery clearly displays, respectively, a gun and a knife plunged into a character’s back. Despite the subtle structural shifts throughout the series, uniting “The Space Between” thirty paintings is Baldessari’s singular approach to his photographic source materials, which he culled from his vast archive of film stills, press images and local ephemera. Certain themes reveal themselves across the series, including the preponderance of body parts, a quintessentially Baldessarian subject, in the form of hands, ears, mouths and arms. Expressive features by nature, they perform an array of gestures across the paintings (pointing, grasping, punching, gripping), at every turn carefully orchestrated by the artist to conjure surreal and evocative, but always open-ended, messages. Handheld implements such as weapons, tools and cameras also take center stage, giving the series a sense of movement, tension and dynamism.
Photo: John Baldessari, The Space Between Head and Edge, 2019, Varnished inkjet prints on canvas with acrylic paint, 137.5 x 146.4 x 3.8 cm / 54 1/8 x 57 5/8 x 1 1/2 inches, © John Baldessari 2019. Courtesy Estate of John Baldessari © 2021
Info: Sprüth Magers Gallery, 5900 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, CA, USA, Duration: 12/6-11/9/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 12:00-17:00, https://spruethmagers.com
