Arms & Legs (Specif. Elbows & Knees), etc.: Arm (with Bottle) belongs to Baldessari’s most recent series of paintings in which the artist brings together photographic, painted, and three-dimensional elements, to juxtapose unlikely body fragments such as noses and ears, elbows and knees, or eyebrows and foreheads. Humorously playing with the legacy of Surrealism, these uncanny binary arrangements set up the rest of the body as an interstitial space and affirm the subjective nature of representation.
John Baldessari is one of the most influential contemporary artists by virtue of his own conceptual practice and as teacher at CalArts, where he founded the “post-studio” movement in 1971. Baldessari’s work has assumed various forms for more than three decades, including photography, painting, conceptual gestures, video, books, prints, objects, and installations.
In One Must , an image of a pair of scissors, accompanied by the words of work’s title, poses an ominous question about the relationship between the image and the text...
The voids in Baldessari’s painted photographs are simultaneously positive and negative spaces, both additive and subtractive...