Baldessari John

born in 1931

photographer, painter, director, videographer, visual artist, media artist

Major figure of contemporary art, John Baldessari used to be described as "one of the most influent artists that appeared in the mid-60s" by Richard Koshalek of the Contemporary Art Museum of Los Angeles. From his text-photographs of the 60s to his picture collages and installation of the 80s, Baldessari widely contributed to the definition of postmodern art. His application of some strategies of artistic creation, such as appropiration, destructuration, out-of-contexting, juxtaposition of images and text ... turns out to be visionary, just like the incorporation of linguistic systems and the media in his works. He used to be one the most imitated Conceptual Art Movement artists in the early 70s. He also made a set of videos in which he ironically studies the mechanisms of perception, meaning, interpretation. Those strange conceptual exercises, done with dry-and-often-absurd humour, use cultural objects (combining film images and magazine pictures to jokes for history of art initiates) as frames for iconoclast questioning of art and language.

http://www.baldessari.org/ http://www.baldessari.net/ http://www.baeditions.com/john-baldessari-artwork.htm