Beschreibung:

JOHN BALDESSARI (1931-2020)Two Landscapes (One Blocked): Each with Two Figures (One Yellow/Violet) 1990 vinyl paint on colour photographs, in two parts Each: 122.7 by 178.8 cm. 48 5/16 by 70 3/8 in. Overall: 245.4 by 178.8 cm. 96 5/8 by 70 3/8 in. This work was executed in 1990. FootnotesProvenance Marian Goodman Gallery, New York Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 2011 Literature Patrick Pardo and Robert Dean Eds., John Baldessari Catalogue Raisonné Volume Three: 1987-1993, New Haven and London 2015, p. 298, no. 1990.113, illustrated in colour John Baldessari's Two Landscapes (One Blocked): Each with Two Figures (One Yellow/Violet) depicts two rural photographs with pairs of figures in the foreground each figure energised in the artist's application of vivid, bold brushwork. Characteristic of the artist's practice, the work is composed of two large separate panels that are vertically stacked to be viewed as a diptych. In this present work, Baldessari renders all four of his figures anonymous. Each pairing sits opposite one another in what we might suppose to be intimate conversation. Whether they are quarrelling, or conversing remains a mystery; we as the viewer are not invited to engage in their respective dialogues. By masking the subjects of his images, Baldessari shrouds the associations that tether one to the other. Their relationship instead becomes one entirely contingent upon aesthetics. The artist seeks to make it known that their stories and imagined lives were not to be the primary entry point into his art. By breaking with the presumed narratives, Baldessari challenges his viewer to reflect upon what his images intend to communicate. His painted figures are abstract and flat, disrupting the coherence of the scene and puncturing its perspectival space. Two Landscapes (One Blocked): Each with Two Figures (One Yellow/Violet), from 1990 was executed in a significant year in the artist's career during which his acclaimed solo exhibition travelled from the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, to, among others, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C., and the Whitney Museum of Art, New York. Considered one of the founders of Conceptual art, Baldessari was a hugely innovative force in contemporary art through his pioneering use of appropriated imagery. Initially trained as painter, he began to incorporate texts and photography into his canvases in the mid-1960s. In 1970 he began working in printmaking, film, video, installation, sculpture, and photography. He created thousands of works which demonstrate and combine the narrative potential of images and the associative power of language within the boundaries of the work of art. His use of appropriation, erasure, alteration, and montage to disrupt a narrative or to construct an entirely new meaning out of combined fragments has been utilised in different ways in a multiple body of works spanning his career. Alongside his artistic practise, Baldessari taught art for nearly three decades. His move to Santa Monica in 1970 allowed him to meet many artists and writers, and he began teaching at CalArts. Throughout his life Baldessari was instrumental in the West Coast art scene and influenced many younger artists during his long teaching career. He taught David Salle Mike Kelley and Tony Oursler and influenced the likes of Cindy Sherman Annette Lemieux and Barbara Kruger among many others. Baldessari has gained international renown over the course of his six-decade career. The celebrated artist was a recipient of the Americans for the Arts Lifetime Achievement Award and the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement awarded at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009. In 2010, Baldessari's work was the subject of the major retrospective, Pure Beauty, which retraced his remarkable career from 1962 to 2010. Organised by Tate Modern, London, the exhibition travelled to MACBA, Barcelona; LACMA, Los Angeles, a