Installation images courtesy of the artist and PKM Gallery. Photographed by Sangtae Kim.
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The solo exhibition of John Baldessari, the living master of conceptual art, will be held from June 3rd to July 12th at the PKM Gallery. This will be his first large-scale exhibition to be hosted in Korea in 20 years since 1996, and 15 of his most representative pieces will be selected among his 2008-2015 works.
Baldessari opened a new era of conceptual art in 1960 with his paintings focused on the relationship between language and images which acutely shed light upon the sociocultural impacts of images in the mass media and received much acclaim from critics. His Cremation Project (1970), in which he burned all the paintings dating from 1953 to 1966, placed him in the ranks of true conceptual artists, and he has since been active in a vast scope of experimental art including installation, sculpture, film, and photography.
Baldessari’s creative process bases itself upon the narrative power of images, satirizing the conventional unawareness towards images in media by deconstructing and recreating common media motifs, thus creating new possibilities for narration. In Baldessari’s acclaimed series Pictures & Scripts, Storyboard, Morsels & Snippets, and Double Play, familiar snippets reminiscent of film stills and primary color panels combine with the artist’s trademark enigmatic taglines to create one large picture. A blonde gestures plaintively, workers line up with baskets of red fruit, and a hand grips a black cane in these striking narrative devices, yet they refuse to reveal who the woman is, who is about to do what, or which story these images intend to depict; the artist takes special care in his concealment by covering or cutting off parts of his scenes. Cryptic captions such as “lberian Pork Tail with Crispy Leaves and Toasted Sweet Millet Oil” or “Four Women At Fashion Show Staring At a Model” also provide unnecessary or contradictory information, hindering conventional understanding.
Borrowing from popular media images, Baldessari removes and subverts the mythical links between images and their natural evocations, not only revealing the fraudulence of media recreation but also building an atmosphere of confusion and obfuscation through the clash between his words and images. In this manner, the artist induces his viewers to bridge the gaps in meaning and actively provide new interpretations.
John Baldessari grew up in California, attended San Diego State College and UC Berkeley, and received an honorary doctorate from the Otis Art Institute. In 1970 he began teaching at CalArts (California Institute of the Arts), and until his retirement in 2007 from UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles) he mentored many influential artists such as Richard Prince, David Salle, and Sherrie Levine. His works have been featured in multiple large-scale personal exhibitions and retrospectives at the Tate Modern, Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), as well as collective expositions at the MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Centre Pompidou. In 2009, he received the Golden Lion Award for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale.
John Baldessari(1931-2020) is a towering figure in American conceptual art who questioned the relationship between the image and the text by recontextualizing and intentionally clashing found images from movie stills, billboards, photographs, and classical paintings with undecipherable texts. In the Cremation Project from 1970, Baldessari burned his own artworks produced since 1953 to 1966 to break with tradition. From then on, the artist experimented with diverse mediums including painting, sculpture, photography, film, and installation work. Baldessari focued fostering the next generation of artists during his professorship at the California Institute of the Arts and UCLA and has caused a great influence on artists such as Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, and David Salle. His awards and honors include the 2009 Venice Biennale Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement and the 2014 National Medal of Arts Award. He has held more than 300 solo shows and participated in more than 1,000 group exhibitions. His works are included in the collections of world-renowned institutions including the Museum of Modern Art (New York, USA), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York, USA), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, USA), and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington D.C., USA).
PKM Gallery was established in 2001 in Seoul by Park Kyung-mee—an art historian and the commissioner of the Korean Pavilion at the 49th Venice Biennale—with a mission to promote Korean art abroad and to foster conversation between Korean and international contemporary art. With previous locations in Hwa-dong and Cheongdam-dong, the gallery moved to its current space in Samcheong-dong—an artistic and cultural hub in the heart of Seoul—in 2015.
