John Baldessari

John Baldessari Edited with text by Matilda Olof-Ors. Text by John Baldessari, Ann-Sofi Noring, Gitte Ørskou. A concise celebration of conceptualist legend John Baldessari’s wry approach to image-making Over the course of his 50-year career, John Baldessari never stopped exploring the seemingly infinite ways that words and images can be manipulated to create new layers of narrative meaning in art. Initially a more traditional painter, in the 1960s Baldessari found himself drawn to a combination of text and photography as the most effective vehicles for his creative intentions. Many of Baldessari’s pieces directly address the viewer with hand-painted questions about the nature of art: in What Is Painting (1966-68), Baldessari asks through the canvas, “Do you sense how all the parts of a good picture are involved with each other, not just placed side by side” This piece in particular seems to summarize Baldessari’s focus on the recontextualization of familiar images that woul