John Baldessari

John Baldessari was born in 1931 in National City and died in January 2020 in Los Angeles, both in California, United States of America. In the mid-1960s, he abandoned painting and began a journey that would strongly influence the artistic scene of his time to this day. Taking ownership of images from various sources, such as advertising and cinema, he combined different languages, media and techniques: photography, video, collage, text, installation. Its compositions simplify the reading of images, through procedures such as juxtapositions or unexpected collages, highlighting or hiding certain details. Almost always with a sense of humour or irony, he made a critical and analytical comment about society, the functioning of the art world and of contemporary culture. He is recognized worldwide as one of the prominent figures of Conceptual Art. As a teacher at CalArts - California Institute of the Arts, between 1970 and 1988, and at UCLA - University of California Los Angeles, between 1996 and 2007, he played a central role in boosting the Californian art scene and driving the career of many emerging artists. His innovative teaching methods rejected traditional workshop practices and established a post-disciplinary vision of art. 

His work has been, and continues to be, exhibited repeatedly in the most important artistic institutions, with over 300 individual and 1000 collective exhibitions in the USA and Europe. He participated in Documenta (1972, 1982) and the Venice Biennale (1997, 2003), and in 2009 obtained the Gold Lion Award for his career.He has received numerous awards, both in his country and abroad, including the Lifetime Achievement Award - National Arts Awards (2005), the Kaiserring award from the city of Goslar, Germany (2012), and the 2014 National Medal of Arts Award. In 2009, Tate Modern presented a retrospective of his work under the title John Baldessari: Pure Beauty, covering his work produced between 1962 and 2010, which, after London, travelled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art New York, and the MACBA - Museum d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona. Being considered one of the most important artists of the contemporary world, he is represented in the collections of MoMA and Guggenheim in New York, among many others, private and institutional. 

CB, novembro 2020