Baldessari began to move away from gestural painting when he started to work with materials from billboard posters. It prompted him to analyze how the public means of communication functioned. It could be argued that his work ever since has done the same. He works with pre-existing images, often arranging them in such a way as to suggest a narrative, yet the various means he employs to distort them - from cropping the images, to collaging them with unrelated images, to blocking out faces and objects with colored dots - all force us to ask how and what the image is communicating.
John Baldessari has his trademark where he cover the main parts of the photo which attracts peoples attention and covers them, causing people to focus on the other parts of the photo. The colour also adds a pop to the photo. |
John Baldessari is a leading Californian Conceptual artist. Painting was important to his early work. When he slowly started to emerge, in the early 1960s, he was working in a gestural style. Though by the end of the decade he started to introduce text and pre-existing images. In the 1970s he stopped painting completely and made in a diverse range of media, though his interests generally centered on the photographic image. Conceptual art has shaped his interest in exploring how photographic images communicate, yet his work has little of the austerity usually associated with that style; instead he works with light humor, and with materials and motifs that also reflect the influence of Pop art.
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