John Baldessari
The End of the Line
07/17—
11/18/24

First South American survey devoted to John Baldessari (United States, 1931-2020), the great pioneer of conceptual art. The exhibition features a selection of 45 works, spanning paintings, photographs and installations drawn from the collection of Craig Robins – a friend, promoter, close interlocutor and one of the most important collectors of Baldessari's work.

John Baldessari: The End of the Line reviews 50 years of the artist's work organized in four thematic groupings by Karen Grimson, curator of the Craig Robins Collection. The exhibition highlights Baldessari’s foundational works from the 1960s and '70s; the radical incineration of his own work; his serial approach to photography; and his ongoing exploration of the interplay between imagery and language, between the world of text and that of ideas.

Baldessari started his artistic career in the field of painting, and in the mid-1960s he began to incorporate texts and photographs into his canvases, questioning the limits of painting, and the authorial notion of the work of art. Starting in 1970, after cremating the paintings made between 1953 and 1966, he began to work in film, video, installation, and continued to develop his photographic practice, in works that explore the narrative connotations of images in tandem with the associative potential of language. Baldessari is recognized for his enormous influence on generations of artists through decades of teaching at the California Institute of the Arts and the University of California, Los Angeles.

In August 1974, the Centro de Arte y Comunicación (CAYC) organized Baldessari's first exhibition in Argentina, presenting the artist's book Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line (Best of Thirty-Six Attempts) (1973). Fifty years later, the presentation of Craig Robins Collection at Malba offers an integral perspective of the artist's development, incorporating the original images from that book into the broader context of his exceptional career.

Organized in collaboration with the Craig Robins Collection. Curated by Karen Grimson.