JOHN BALDESSARI
National City (USA), 1931- Venice (USA) 2020

In 1957 he finished his studies at the San Diego State College with an MA in art. He worked as an illustrator and teacher, developing paintings with a progressively more abstract style, which he exhibited for the first time in 1960. His disenchantment with the art system, which he symbolised in terms of critics and theoricians, led in 1966 to his first text-on-canvas works, in which he literally transferred to the canvas extracts and annotations, by himself or others, about the need for art, painting and the artist. These texts, the lettering of which he delegated to other artists, were soon accompanied by photographs of his native city, taken by himself in a rather unorthodox style, which he printed on the canvas as a part of an investigation of the rhetorical function and semantic ambivalence of text and image. In 1968 he began teaching at the University of California and he exhibited for the first time in Los Angeles, at the Molly Barnes Gallery. In his Commissioned Paintings (1969) he continued to explore the role of the artist by entrusting the execution of the work to other artists working in accordance with his idea and instructions, a circumstance that he indicated by calling the works A Painting by...
In 1970, after burning all the work he had produced between 1953 and 1966, he moved to Los Angeles. That year he presented his first solo exhibition in New York, at the Richard Feigen Gallery, and this was followed by his first exhibitions in Europe (Amsterdam and Düsseldorf) and his inclusion in the Biennale di Venezia in 1972. He introduced the themes of chance and randomness into his work, influenced by the ideas of Cage, which are present in his first films. In the latter part of the decade he altered and recodified images taken from the cinema, using combinations of pictures and elements of painting, complementing the analytical function and the pleasure of the act of looking, developing this aspect extensively during the eighties. At the transition between the decades there was a flurry of selective exhibitions of his work, particularly the travelling exhibition that visited Madrid, Valencia and Bordeaux in 1989 and the one organised by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 1990, which subsequently travelled to San Francisco and New York. In the nineties the underlying them of time could be seen in his return to pictures of National City in black and white, confronted with other images in colour in an apparently incoherent dialogue. A tribute to Goya continued his explorations of the explicit and the implicit, and this was combined with an interest in new technologies as tools for work, reflected in his Elbow series (1999).