John Baldessari: The Stadel Paintings

Description

John Baldessari is an important American conceptual artists and the last member of the American postwar avant-garde. His large collages, created for the Frankfurt exhibition, draw on masterpieces at the Stadel, from Lucas Cranach the Elder to Maria Lassnig. A multifaceted opposition and juxtaposition of old and new art is revealed by the texts and photographs. By destroying all of his paintings created from 1953 to 1966 in 1970, John Baldessari (*1931) paved the way for an independent and unmistakeable pictorial style between painting and photography, text and image. He employs classic Modernist pictorial strategies such as montage and the integration of everyday elements in order to confront these with artistic practices of the post-war avant-gardes, such as discourses on consumerism and the media. Baldessari intertwines media and materials and thereby combines entirely distinct groups of artistic subjects. In the process, the unambiguousness of the pictorial language has given way to a multi-layered readability.

Martin Engler is an art historian and head of the contemporary art department at the Stadel Museum Frankfurt in Germany.

"More than four decades after burning his work, the West Coast conceptualist has brought his deadpan humour to bear on one of Germany's leading historical art collections."-- "Art Newspaper, on the exhibition" (11/5/2015 12:00:00 AM) "Taking these works as his point of departure, the artist explores the relationship not only between painting and photography, but also that between image and language. . . . The result is a suspenseful and complex consonance/dissonance that queries old and new art alike and breaks with established patterns of perception."-- "e-flux, on the exhibition" (11/5/2015 12:00:00 AM) "To mark the Stadel Museum's bicentennial, . . . California conceptual artist John Baldessari has produced a new series of works based on masterpieces owned by the museum. . . . The large-scale collages . . . pit text against image, . . . with more than a hint of sardonic humor."-- "ArtNews, on the exhibition" (11/5/2015 12:00:00 AM)