John Baldessari (National City, 1931 - Los Angeles 2020) is one of the most influential American artists of the second half of the 20th century. With a long career as a teacher, above all at CAL Arts in Valencia, California, and later at UCLA in Los Angeles, he built bridges between European culture and American vernacular visual culture that were essential for a wide range of artists for whom his use of photography opened up new fields of relationship between art and image.The use of photography with text, whether produced by himself when he was still living in National City, near San Diego, or appropriated from any source - particularly cinema, from which he built up a huge archive of residual - plateau images - was a means of getting closer to reality and progressively moving away from the practice of painting, with which his work began in the 1950s. Combining an extensive cultural background with a fine sense of irony - and even a derisive sense of humour - Baldessari built a body of work in which erudite references are always undermined by textual descriptions inscribed on the works or in the titles, which refer them to divergent areas and contexts, sometimes contradictory, sometimes almost tautological.The «- Vanitas Series», to which this work belongs, was created in 1981 and occupies a unique place in John Baldessari's oeuvre, having been exhibited at the Stampa in Basel in 1983. Drawing on a historical typology of genre painting in vogue in the Low Countries between the end of the 16th century and the middle of the following century - - Vanitas- was a sub-genre of still life focused on drawing attention to the precariousness and transience of life - Baldessari makes use of the visual typologies that were typical of the genre so important in the Calvinist environment: skulls, fruit, soap bubbles and books. His version, however, includes some ironic substitutions: the unlit candles of the Dutch tradition are replaced by a battery-operated flashlight and a toothbrush appears unexpectedly, a scatological remnant of the most prosaic impermanence.Made at a time of great personal and affective change, - Vanitas Series is a vortex in Baldessari's work, a place where the sombreness of death meets the small irony of everyday life.