John Baldessari was a central figure in the conceptual art movement of the 1960s and is widely regarded as one of the most influential artists of the last fifty years. Winner of the Golden Lion award for Lifetime Achievement at the 2009 Venice Biennale, his career has extended across a wide range of media, from paintings, photographs, videos, books, prints and multiples to sculptures and installations, creating a diverse and unique body of work.
In the 1960s and 70s Baldessari experimented with games and actions, text paintings and photographs, to explore the language of visual culture and the relationship between image and text. In the 1970s he began assembling images using storyboard formats and sequential frames and, in addition to his own photographs, drew from Hollywood archives of film stills, an instrumental action for the development of appropriation art.
Since the 1980s, Baldessari has cropped, enlarged and reconfigured sampled cinematic imagery, creating photo-compositions with fragmented scenes and inconclusive narratives. In the mid 80s he began to cut-out silhouettes or obscure faces with brightly coloured dots, taking the focus away from the face, while more recent works have highlighted less expressive features, such as the nose and ears, in photo-compositions and sculptures. Sculpture was also the medium for his most recent project at the Prada Foundation in Milan, The Giacometti Variations, 2010. Exploring the relationship between art and fashion, Baldessari made interventions upon the tall, thin forms inspired by the Swiss sculptor.
His new work, Your Name in Lights, continues to reveal the codes of media culture, drawing on ideas of fame in the modern world and the conflation of the roles of celebrity and artist. Using imagery taken from historic symbols of celebrity, such as Broadway neon and Hollywood lights, Baldessari gives everyone the opportunity for a glittering but short-lived moment of fame. A supercharged variation of Andy Warhol’s prediction that in the future everyone will have their 15 minutes, Your Name in Lights gives you just 15 seconds.
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John Baldessari, The Giacometti Variations, Prada Foundation, Milan
John Baldessari, Ear Sofa Nose Sconce with Flowers (in Stage Setting), Spruth Magers, London
