Modern and Contemporary Art

Note

The father of American Conceptual Art is John Baldessari (1931-2020). Baldessari's work sits at the intersection of photography, painting and text. Having started as a painter, in 1970 Baldessari decided to cremate his paintings he made between 1953-1966. The ashes are interred in a bronze urn shaped as a book, hence a piece of art, and thus forth his career as a conceptual artist was born. Baldessari's use of appropriation, erasure, alteration, and montage to disrupt a narrative or to construct new meaning out of recombined fragments has been utilized in different bodies of works spanning his career. Baldessari is perhaps best known as the artist who puts dots over peoples faces, which he started in the mid 1980s till his death.

Studio is an iconic and celebrated work, an edition is in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Retrospective exhibitions of his work were shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, which traveled to San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and the Musée d'Art Contemporain, Montreal in 1990-92; at Cornerhouse, Manchester, and traveled to London, Stuttgart, Ljubljana, Oslo, and Lisbon in 1995-96 entitled "This Not That;" and Pure Beauty opened at the Tate Modern, London, in 2009 and traveled to Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art; LACMA; and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, through 2011.