John Baldessari

One of the most influential artists of the last 50 years, John Baldessari was integral to both the conceptual art movement of the 1960s and to appropriation art. With an interest in exploring the language of visual culture and the relationship between image and text, some of Baldessari’s work from the 1970s and 1980s deconstruct cinematic language while others playfully reference the genres of performance art and minimalist art through the use of repetitive gestures with an absurdist edge. His 1977 video performance, Six Colourful Inside Jobs, 1977, will be re-imagined for13 Rooms as Thirteen Colourful Inside Jobs, 2013. In this work a painter changes the wall colour in one room for the duration of the exhibition, carefully following the instructions of the artist. 

Winner of the Golden Lion award for Lifetime Achievement at the 2009 Venice Biennale, Baldessari has exhibited in widely and held a major retrospective, Pure Beauty, at London’s Tate Modern in 2009 which toured international museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Baldessari also created Kaldor Public Art Project 23,Your Name in Lights, in 2011.