The American conceptualist mastermind John Baldessari returns to London this week for his first solo show since his “Pure Beauty” retrospective at the Tate Modern in 2009, with the opening this Friday of “Pictures & Scripts” at the spectacular David Adjaye–designed Marian Goodman Gallery on Soho’s Golden Square.
The exhibition will include a series of 20 new paintings that pair cropped black-and-white film stills with certain characters or figures painted over or obscured, with lines of text taken from fictional scripts that reveal conversations between imaginary art-world insiders. The large canvases nod to Baldessari’s early explorations of combining appropriated images and text, an endeavor he began in the mid-1960s, having previously focused on work that highlighted his training as a painter.
Meanwhile, at Goodman’s smaller Paris space in Le Marais, a simultaneous exhibition will feature Baldessari’s early works, including Bird #1, 1962, a painting depicting a cropped bird that appears to fall through the frame, which is a rare example of work that survived Baldessari’s infamous, self-imposed incineration of 125 of his early paintings in 1970.
“Pictures & Scripts” runs through April 25 at Marian Goodman Gallery, 5-8 Lower John Street, London; “Early Work” is on view through April 11 at Galerie Marian Goodman, 79 rue du Temple, Paris; mariangoodman.com
