John Baldessari: New Work
Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles
19 April – 24 May 1997
Margo Leavin Gallery presents an exhibition of new large-scale works on canvas by John Baldessari.
A leading and highly influential conceptual artist, John Baldessari has produced work incorporating photographic images and, on occasion, text since 1960s. Through a careful process of editing, selection, repetition, and re-combination of images, John Baldessari creates works that are at once narrative, wry, provocative and poignant.
In contrast to much of his recent work, which has used images appropriated from film stills and popular media, the works in this exhibition use images taken from photographs by the artist. These works re-introduce John Baldessari’s examination of the dialogue between imagery and text which he first explored in his seminal works on canvas made in National City, California, during the first years of the 1960s. Reductive in palette and uniform in scale, each of the works in this exhibition (which also reflect the artist’s return to working on canvas) consists of a single photographic image, often juxtaposed with titles derived from Francisco Goya’s ground-breaking 19th century etching series, Los Caprichos (The Caprices).
John Baldessari’s work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions, including major recent shows at the Serpentine Gallery, London, the Kunstverein, Stuttgart, and the Cornerhouse, Manchester, England. The Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, presented John Baldessari’s early works on canvas from National City in an exhibition during the summer of 1996, and in 1990-92 a retrospective of the artist’s work was seen at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. This is the artist’s seventh one-person exhibition at Margo Leavin Gallery.
MARGO LEAVIN GALLERY
812 North Robertson Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90069
