John Baldessari

American artist John Baldessari has been regarded since the 1960s as one of the foremost and most versatile of conceptual artists, exploring such diverse media as painting, drawing, photography and video. As a professor at the California Institute of the Arts, he has influenced generations of artists and is revered as the father of the Picture Generation – a group of well-known artists such as David Salle, James Welling, Matt Mullican, Troy Brauntuch, and many others.

In his oeuvre, Baldessari often questions the relationship between text and image by juxtaposing the medium of the written word alongside that of the visual image. In doing so, he contrasts two different means of communication and explores the complex relationship between two fundamental forms of human expression. Combining text and image within a work formulates new statements and, with that, opens up a whole new range of connotations, associations and innovative approaches that inspire different ways of thinking.