John Baldessari: Miró and Life in General
Marian Goodman Gallery, London
London | UKMarian Goodman Gallery is pleased to present a new series of works by John Baldessari, Miró and Life in General. This is the artist’s second major exhibition at Marian Goodman Gallery, London.
Throughout his career, John Baldessari has explored the correlations and contrasts between painting and photography, and between image and language. Beginning with his early text and photo-text paintings from the 1960s, he has explored these dichotomies through hybrid compositions of photography, text and painted images. His 2010 Tate Modern retrospective, Pure Beauty, highlighted these early text-and-image paintings as well as his influential 1980s photo-based works, which explore the cultural and artistic impact of mass media; a topic that reverberates to this day. However, in the last five years, in work such as the Doubles series from 2011 and 2012 and Movie Scripts: Art, 2014, Baldessari’s focus has turned to the art historical canon and he has made the medium of painting the central subject of his work. These earlier series juxtapose images from 15th – 20th century paintings with texts from art history, popular music, and film noir, in order to deduce new meaning from art history and to create new ways of seeing.
The current series, Miró and Life in General, continues this investigation into the history of painting. Each work features a detail from one specific Miró painting and pairs it with a seemingly incongruous, Hollywood film still, displaying what Baldessari refers to as ‘Life in General’. Each pairing is further partnered with a word – ‘Reliable’, ‘Necessary’, ‘True’, ‘Unfailing’ etc. – each a synonym of the other. Neither the original root word, nor the specific Miró painting are revealed, asking viewers to respond in their own way and to create their own new composite meaning. This pairing of disparate elements from art history, popular culture and language, both dissembles the canon, and reassembles it in a new form. As a towering figure of 20th century American Conceptual art and as one of the most influential teachers of a generation of artists, Baldessari’s new works ultimately question the very nature of the artist’s place within the canon of art history itself.
Marian Goodman Gallery is pleased to present a new series of works by John Baldessari, Miró and Life in General. This is the artist’s second major exhibition at Marian Goodman Gallery, London.
Throughout his career, John Baldessari has explored the correlations and contrasts between painting and photography, and between image and language. Beginning with his early text and photo-text paintings from the 1960s, he has explored these dichotomies through hybrid compositions of photography, text and painted images. His 2010 Tate Modern retrospective, Pure Beauty, highlighted these early text-and-image paintings as well as his influential 1980s photo-based works, which explore the cultural and artistic impact of mass media; a topic that reverberates to this day. However, in the last five years, in work such as the Doubles series from 2011 and 2012 and Movie Scripts: Art, 2014, Baldessari’s focus has turned to the art historical canon and he has made the medium of painting the central subject of his work. These earlier series juxtapose images from 15th – 20th century paintings with texts from art history, popular music, and film noir, in order to deduce new meaning from art history and to create new ways of seeing.
The current series, Miró and Life in General, continues this investigation into the history of painting. Each work features a detail from one specific Miró painting and pairs it with a seemingly incongruous, Hollywood film still, displaying what Baldessari refers to as ‘Life in General’. Each pairing is further partnered with a word – ‘Reliable’, ‘Necessary’, ‘True’, ‘Unfailing’ etc. – each a synonym of the other. Neither the original root word, nor the specific Miró painting are revealed, asking viewers to respond in their own way and to create their own new composite meaning. This pairing of disparate elements from art history, popular culture and language, both dissembles the canon, and reassembles it in a new form. As a towering figure of 20th century American Conceptual art and as one of the most influential teachers of a generation of artists, Baldessari’s new works ultimately question the very nature of the artist’s place within the canon of art history itself.
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