Four (Red, Black, Blue, Yellow) Faces, Cowboy Hats, and Prison Bars, 2006 Three dimensional archival digital photographic prints, with acrylic paint, 135.8 x 270.5 x 10.1 cm, 71 1/2 x 100 x 4 inches John Baldessari Noses & Ears, Etc., Part Two Marian Goodman Gallery is very pleased to announce a new exhibition by John Baldessari. On view will be a series of new works titled "Noses & Ears, Etc.," a group of digital photographic prints over-painted with acrylic paint and collage elements, which Baldessari says, "continue my fascination with color, the relation of photography to painting, and viewing the picture plane on three levels rather than the conventional single plane. Perhaps these works can be seen as not painting, photography or sculpture, but a melding of all three." The subject of this series, an ironic look at the portrayal of "faces" (bringing to the fore the nose and the ear), highlights the conceptual strategies that have been an ongoing concern in Baldessari's work, namely "what we leave in and what we leave out" of an image and how that shapes the subsequent history of a representation. In this group of works Baldessari alludes to the uncanny; to the workings of chance, editing, and choice; the forces that contend within a photograph; and the resulting act of selection which ensues and shapes visual memory. Writing about the exhibition, Baldessari says, "The series Noses & Ears, Etc. had its inception when I was a painter in the mid-fifties. I was immersed in thinking about totality- (what is a whole and what is a part?). Painting sections of the human body was a part of that investigation - ears and noses especially. Eyes and lips were done in past art because they seemed whole and didn't seem to suffer much by being isolated (cf. Redon, Man Ray). The nose was more a subject of literature (Pinocchio, Cyrano, Gogol, Tristram Shandy, Etc.). To represent people only by an ear and/or nose became for me another way of reducing human identity to a minimum. Faces become clichés like anything else so viewing people only by ears and/or nose might enable the viewer to see afresh." (John Baldessari, September 2006) John Baldessari has been an innovative force in contemporary art, redefining its parameters to include its role as a visual evocation of language, and leading the way in bringing photography as a medium to the forefront of contemporary art, a movement which changed the international art world forever. The artist's trajectory, developed over five decades of conceptual practice, began with painting and later moved to photo-based work, embracing film, video, books, prints, objects and installation along the way. Baldessari's use of appropriation, alteration, cropping, erasure, and montage to disrupt a narrative or to construct an entirely new meaning out of recombined fragments, has been utilized in disparate ways in different bodies of works spanning his career. From the early photo-text paintings of the sixties, to the conceptual works of the seventies, to the "found pictures" of the 1980s; from the erased identity and overpainted "dot" works of the 1990s, to the "Goya" series and later "Tetrad" works of the late nineties; and more recently, from the "Overlaps"/"Intersections", and "Windows"/"Columns", as well as "Prima Facie" works, allegory and allusion, dichotomy and opposition, and chance correspondences, are at the heart of Baldessari's working practice. In recent years, he has also been investigating new issues of painting in his work. John Baldessari was born in National City, California in 1931. He received his BA and MA from San Diego State College, CA (1949-53 and 1955-57, respectively) and studied at University of California, Berkeley (1954-55); UCLA (1955); Otis Art Institute 91957-59); and the Chouinard Art Institute, LA. This year he will be honored by The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles on October 7th, and The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, on November 9th. He was the recipient in April 2006 of a Doctor of Fine Arts, honoris causa, National University of Ireland. A major retrospective in two parts: "Works 1962-1984" at the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna, and "Works: 1984-2005" at Kunsthaus Graz am Landesmuseum Joanneum, Graz was held in 2005. Most recently, Baldessari was invited to curate the exhibition "Ways of Seeing: John Baldessari Explores the Collection," now on view at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden through July 2007. A solo exhibition of the "Prima Facie" works is currently on view at the Museum Dhondt Daenens, Belgium, through early December. A unique installation of Baldessari's work will be featured in "Magritte and Contemporary Art: The Treachery of images" at LACMA, Los Angeles, an exhibition devoted to exploring the impact of Magritte's work on thirty-one contemporary artists, on view from November 19th through March 4, 2007. Solo presentations of his work over the past five years have included exhibitions at: Carre d'Art Musee Contemporain de Nimes, France (2005-2006); Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin (2004); Museo d'Arte Moderna Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Trento, Italy (2000-2001); Sprengel Museum, Hannover, (1999-2000); and Albertina im Adademiehof, Vienna (1999). Exhibition: October 19 - November 25, 2006 Gallery hours: Mon-Sat 10 am - 6 pm Marian Goodman Gallery 24 West 57th Street USA-New York 10019, NY Telephone +1 212 977 71 60 Fax +1 212 581 51 87 Email goodman@mariangoodman.com www.mariangoodman.com |
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