John Baldessari
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John Baldessari is one of the most important representatives of Concept Art and one of the most influential American artists of the post-war decades. As an artist and as a professor, he played a major role in shaping Concept Art with his photographic and video works, collages and image-text montages, and inspired numerous young artists.
In 1970, in his now famous "Cremation Project", he burned works he had created between 1953 and 1966, baked cookies from the ashes and placed them, along with life dates and the recipe, in an urn as a sign of the connection between artistic practice and the human life cycle. He cut up photographs, distorted them, added writings and texts. In striking, film-like images, he dissected the American way of life. Baldessari changed the way we deal with the media image and saw in it social criticism - always paired with subversive wit.
As a rule, I rarely get to work with just one image. It seems like I always have to have several images collide. I think the reason is that life is not like that, that it is only about one thing. It's multiple things colliding with each other, where one gives meaning to the other.
John Baldessari received, among other awards, the "Golden Lion" of the Venice Biennale for his life's work. Since the first exhibition in 1960, he had over 200 solo exhibitions and participated in more than 1,000 group exhibitions.
John Baldessari (born 1931 National City, California) died in 2020 in Venice, Los Angeles.