![]() ![]() Mostly assembled from photocopies of the photographic sources, these maquettes reveal the copy machine as an essential tool in Baldessari's practice, easily replicated, replaced or taped onto each other to maximise compositional possibilities.Ī final section of the exhibition examines another cornerstone in Baldessari's practice:the art of removal. Others illuminate Baldessari's art of juxtaposition and combination of images. Some maquettes in the exhibition consist of singular film stills and lobby cards, drawn on directly with crayon, outlining elements which were to be cropped and obscured with paint in the finished works. The Story Underneath presents several of the dominant formal interventions and artistic strategies that Baldessari employed throughout his career. Baldessari considered his maquettes to be artworks themselves, and they bear the traces of his hand as it marked, scribbled, crosshatched, cut out, copied, taped or stuck dots on these found images. Many of these works on paper reveal the original sources-film stills, lobby cards, found photographs-of the vast collection from which he drew inspiration, selected, extracted, removed, cut, reassembled and combined elements to create his works. The maquettes reflect how the artist anticipated the manifold ways in which we deal with and manipulate images today, long before Instagram or Pinterest came to dominate our visual environment.Reflecting the artist's physical manipulations of his source material and the process of his pictorial reinventions, these works capture the heightened moment of transformation when commonplace images turn into artworks by Baldessari.Ĭreated as preparatory works and sketches for his large-scale pieces, the artist's maquettes grant extraordinary insight into his particular way of seeing and composing. This will also be the inaugural exhibition at the gallery's New York space, which opened this summer.Ĭurated by Nana Bahlmann and selected from a large body of rarely seen work, The Story Underneath assembles over seventy-five collages, photographs, film stills and drawings dating from the early 1980s to the early 2000s. In his impressive and influential oeuvre spanning almost six decades, John Baldessari consistently exposed the complex and ambiguous narrative potential of images.ĭrawing from a carefully collected pool of visual signs, he explored how meaning is not necessarily an inherent quality of an image, but is created, deconstructed or obscured when taken out of context, altered or combined with other images or words.Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers, the global representatives of the Estate ofJohn Baldessari, are proud to present the first exhibition of the artist's maquettes in over a decade.
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