John Baldessari: Sediment (Part 2), 2010
October 21 - December 4, 2010
Opening Reception: Thursday, October 21, 6-8 pm
Marian Goodman Gallery is very pleased to announce an upcoming exhibition of new work by John Baldessari. The exhibition opens on Thursday October 21st and will be on view through Saturday, December 4th, 2010.
John Baldessari’s pioneering work, developed over several decades of conceptual practice, includes photo-text paintings, conceptual works and composite photo-based works, as well as video, books, prints, objects and installation. Baldessari’s strategies have revealed an interest in intersecting fragments that are used to explore allegory, allusion and narrative possibility. His use of appropriation, erasure, alteration and montage to interrupt a given 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.
This exhibition presents a group of paintings from a new series titled Sediment, which marks a departure for the artist whose work over the last four years was focused primarily on the isolation of bodily features, unexpected fragments, and uncanny hybrids – noses & ears, elbows & legs, eyebrows & foreheads -- which served to demonstrate the subjective nature of representation. Sediment continues this tendency in Baldessari’s work and his immersion in thinking about totality – what is a part, what is a whole, and what is left to chance and choice in the determination of visual memory. The Sediment works contain fragments, traces, and silhouettes in graphic simplicity in black, white, and grey. More reductive in form and content, minimal contours on a single plane replace what was heretofore disparity between relief and ground. Shapes selected from photographs and overlaid with acrylic paint allude to figures and objects in juxtaposition both recognizable and not, in short, as the artist says, to the remnants or “residue after everything has been strained out…. What is left is the art".
Concurrent with the gallery exhibition, John Baldessari’s major retrospective Pure Beauty which spans five decades of the artist’s work, will have its final stop at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York where it will be on view from October 20th through January 9th , 2011. This is the first major U.S. survey in twenty years devoted to the artist’s innovative work. The exhibition originated at Tate Modern, London where it opened last Fall before travelling to the Museu d’Art Contemporain (MACBA), Barcelona, and The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles this past summer. Upcoming projects include an exhibition at The Prada Foundation, Milan, which opens on October 28th. John Baldessari was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale in 2009.
Please join us at the opening reception on Thursday, October 21st, from 6-8 pm.
