33 Facts About John Baldessari

John Anthony Baldessari was an American conceptual artist known for his work featuring found photography and appropriated images.

John Baldessari lived and worked in Santa Monica and Venice, California.

John Baldessari's art has been featured in more than 200 solo exhibitions in the US and Europe.

John Baldessari's work influenced that of Cindy Sherman, David Salle, Annette Lemieux, and Barbara Kruger among others.

John Baldessari was born in National City, California, to Hedvig Marie Jensen, a Danish nurse, and Antonio John Baldessari, an Italian salvage dealer.

John Baldessari grew up in relative isolation during the Great Depression.

In 1959, John Baldessari began teaching art in the San Diego school system.

John Baldessari taught for nearly three decades, in schools and junior colleges and community colleges, and eventually at the university level.

In 1970, John Baldessari moved to Santa Monica, where he met many artists and writers, and began teaching at CalArts.

John Baldessari quit teaching at CalArts in 1986, moving on to teach at UCLA, which he continued until 2008.

John Baldessari decided the solution was to remove his own hand from the construction of the image and to employ a commercial, lifeless style so that the text would impact the viewer without distractions.

The seemingly legitimate art concerns were intended by John Baldessari to become hollow and ridiculous when presented in such a purely self-referential manner.

John Baldessari is best known for works that blend photographic materials, take them out of their original context and rearrange their form, often including the addition of words or sentences.

In one of the works, John Baldessari had himself photographed in front of a palm precisely so that it would appear that the tree were growing out of his head.

In "Double Bill", a 2012 series of large inkjet prints, John Baldessari paired the work of two selected artists on a single canvas, further altering the appropriated picture plane by overlaying his own hand-painted color additions.

John Baldessari has expressed that his interest in language comes from its similarities in structure to games, as both operate by an arbitrary and mandatory system of rules.

The writer eldritch Priest ties John Baldessari's piece Throwing four balls in the air to get a square as an early example of post-conceptual art.

John Baldessari printed two series one in 2000 copies and a second more precious reserved to the publisher in 500 copies.

Much of John Baldessari's work involves pointing, in which he tells the viewer not only what to look at but how to make selections and comparisons, often simply for the sake of doing so.

John Baldessari's Commissioned Paintings series took the idea of pointing literally, after he read a criticism of conceptual art that claimed it was nothing more than pointing.

John Baldessari then added a caption "A painting by [painter's name]" to each finished painting.

John Baldessari began making prints in the early 1970s and continued to produce editions.

John Baldessari has gone on to create sculptural works that often incorporate resin, bronze, and steel, such as the approximately 2.4 m carrot and an elongated bronze figure trapped wearing a wooden barrel in a nod to Giacometti.

John Baldessari was in over 200 solo shows and 1,000 group shows in his six-decade career.

John Baldessari had his first gallery solo exhibition at the Molly Barnes Gallery in Los Angeles in 1968.

John Baldessari has been the recipient of numerous awards, among others:.

John Baldessari set a personal auction record when his acrylic-on-canvas piece Quality Material was sold for $4.4 million at Christie's New York in 2007.

In 1999, after twenty-six years with the Sonnabend Gallery, John Baldessari went to Marian Goodman.

John Baldessari was represented by Margo Leavin, Spruth Magers, Mai 36 Galerie and Galerie Greta Meert.

Between 1960 and 1984, John Baldessari was married to Montessorian teacher Carol Ann Wixom; they had two children.

In 1990, John Baldessari purchased a bungalow in the coastal Ocean Park neighborhood of Santa Monica and enlisted architects Ron Godfredsen and Danna Sigal for a redesign.

John Baldessari owned a Frank Gehry-designed vacation home in Venice, California.

John Baldessari operated a studio on Main Street in Santa Monica alongside Richard Diebenkorn and James Turrell.