John Baldessari

(National City, California, 6/17/1931 - 1/2/2020, Los Angeles, California)

North America, American

With over sixty years as an artist and forty years as a professor, John Baldessari reigns as the elder statesman of California art in terms of stature in the art world and his enormous influence on multiple generations of artists living and working in California. Baldessari earned his BA (1950) and MA (1957) at San Diego State College, California and pursued additional studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and in Los Angeles at the Otis Art Institute and Chouinard Art Institute. In 1970, Baldessari was named Professor of Art at CalArts, the newly minted California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. In his incredibly influential “Post-studio Art” course, Baldessari challenged students to question every basic assumption they held about what constitutes art, thus spearheading the rise of conceptual art.
Baldessari garnered attention in the late 1960s for his use of language rather than imagery to convey meaning in his paintings. In works that incorporate painting tips, philosophical speculations and his own trenchant art observations, Baldessari took painting, and by extension art making, as his subject. These canvases were followed by works that combine simple snapshots with deadpan captions, which Baldessari described as an attempt to “talk to people in a language they understood.”
Beginning in the late 1970s, Baldessari manipulated anonymous movie stills, refiguring the images to suggest an alternative narrative, and introduced his iconic use of colored dots to obscure the faces of people in found photographs. In 2005, Baldessari’s Prima Facie series—which takes its name from a legal term used to describe the initial appearance of something before closer inspection—signaled the artist’s reexamination of early themes in his work, especially the production of meaning in photographic image and language. Throughout his career, Baldessari has continued to invite viewers to analyze what and how they see.

California, United States

View objects by this artist.