John Baldessari
John Baldessari (1931-2020) lived and worked in Santa Monica, California. The relationship between saying and showing, language and image is in the case of John Baldessari as with no other artist of his generation the subject of intensive artistic research. Following his radical renunciation of painting around 1970, he started working primarily with visual material and, until 1980, with texts from the mass media. The artist takes his images out of their contexts, elaborates them by means of retouching, painting over, contrasting and cutting. He has developed an unmistakeable style, distinguished by the superimposition of photographs and painted areas, and his canvases also comprise printed reproductions. These are the means he uses in his ironic play with pop culture. John Baldessari has taught and influenced generations of artists.
John Baldessari Editions
Give me a B, give me an A ... & etc.
2009
From Forty Are Better Than One
10-part leporello, digital pigment print (Ditone) on 188 g Hahnemühle Photo Rag paper, 32 x 250 cm (12½ x 98½ in). Edition: 75, signed and numbered.
In this edition, John Baldessari spells out his own name using a playful and surreal visual alphabet. Each letter is paired with an unexpected image – a bone for "B", a salt shaker for "S", a dog, an ear, an infinity sign – turning the act of spelling into a semiotic game. This work exemplifies Baldessari’s signature approach: collapsing text and image into a single, witty composition that questions how meaning is constructed. Both humorous and conceptual, the piece highlights Baldessari’s ongoing fascination with language, identity, and the absurdities of visual culture. It’s a cheer, a puzzle, and a self-portrait all at once – an artwork that quite literally spells out the artist’s legacy.
This work was created as part of the group project Forty Are Better Than One: as a special edition of Edition Schellmann's catalogue raisonné to mark the gallery's 40th anniversary.
EUR 1,500
Eyebrow
2009
Digital print, laminated with lexan, mounted on shaped aluminum with acrylic paint. 127 x 40.5 x 15 cm (50 x 16 x 6 in). Edition of 25, with a signed and
numbered certificate.
In the early 2000s, John Baldessari's work consisted primarily of film stills of faces and bodies that were largely covered by layers of paint or collage or altered by the superimposition of paint over the foreheads and eyebrows. The sculpture Eyebrow was created as an edition in 2009 as part of John Baldessari’s unique intervention for the Krefelder Museen Haus Lange and Haus Esters designed by Mies van der Rohe. It was an intervention which inscribed the strict clarity of the architecture with a human motif. The result was a wide range of associations and possibilities for interpretation.
