International Art News

Hockney, David - A Bigger Splash - 1967; Acrylic on canvas, 242.5 x 243.9 cm (95 1/2 x 96 in)

15th of March to 10th of June 2012 – Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin
The exhibition project “Pacific Standard Time – Art in Los Angeles, 1950-1980” traces the development of the Los Angeles art scene during the post-war period, when the city on the Pacific hosted an impressively varied and versatile art scene, thus proving that it was more than Hollywood and a sprawling metropolis in the land of sunshine and palm trees. “Pacific Standard Time” features such internationally esteemed artists as John Baldessari, David Hockney, Edward Kienholz or Ed Ruscha as well as protagonists that are yet to be discovered like the abstract painters Helen Lundeberg and Karl Benjamin, the ceramicists Ken Price and John Mason, and sculptors such as De Wain Valentine.

Betye Saar: The Phrenologer’s Window, 1966

The mega show – over 60 institutions and galleries in Los Angeles were involved – is taking the two main core exhibitions of the Getty Museum and the Getty Research Institute to Europe. The sole European venue is the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin.

What was the feminine element in the avant-gard movements of the West coast? This is an interesting filter to place on the exhibition “Pacific Standard Time” Whether we refer to performances to protest against the war in Vietnam (Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz-Starus), the vitality of the campuses as nests of creativity(with Martha Rosler in San Diego) or even the commitment of audacious collectors (in the footsteps of Betty Asher), a history of art in America after the war can surely not be drawn up in the masculine gender. But male chauvinists need not worry: with John Baldessari to Richard Diebenkorn, including Bruce Naumann and Edward Kienholz.

Judy Chicago: Big Blue Pink, 1971 - Sprayed acrylic lacquer on acrylic - Courtesy Tom Jancar Gallery, Los Angeles - © Judy Chicago, 1971 / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2012, Foto: Donald Woodman

The section of the exhibition that was to be seen in Los Angeles’ Getty Museum under the title of “Crosscurrents in L.A. – Painting and Sculpture, 1950-1970”, presents painting and sculpture. In the second part that was to be seen in Los Angeles under the title of “Greetings from L.A. – Artists and Publics, 1950-1980”, posters, artists’ catalogues, postcards, invitation cards and other memorabilia are shown which offer a deeper insight into the networks of the Los Angeles art scene at that time. For Berlin the show has been supplemented to include photographs by Julius Shulman, whose architectural shots defined the image of the Californian lifestyle in the 1950s. His incomparable sensibility and intuitive feel for composition and the ‘critical moment’ established him as a master of his craft.

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Jen Liu, John Baldessari

16 September 2011  -  22 October 2011 – Ceri Hand Gallery
Six Colorful Tales from the Emotional Spectrum (Women), 2011
In 1977, John Baldessari enlisted six women to tell stories from their childhoods and young adulthoods on video in Six Colourful Tales from the Emotional Spectrum (Women), 1977. He set them against coloured backgrounds that dwarfed the tellers, cropped in the manner of ‘talking heads’. Their stories range from subtle trauma to the banal, but they all shared aspects of violence: as victims and perpetrators, imagined and real.

In Jen Liu’s homage to the original Six Colorful Tales from the Emotional Spectrum (Women), 2011, Baldessari becomes Giallo, a brand of low-budget Italian horror-thriller films that peaked in the 70s. In these films, beautiful brunettes rule a violent world, populating it with psycho killers, detectives, and bloody corpses. If Baldessari’s brunettes reminisce about their experiences of violence, Liu’s brunette enacts them as a fever-dream of misinterpretation, hyperbole, and narrative disruption.

Liu also references Baldessari’s processes in her new series of large drawings, each based on a colour from the spectrum, taking themes from her video and expanding upon them with imagery from 1977. Grey structures impose upon intensely coloured blotches and blobs, echoing the visual play between Baldessari’s subjects and their coloured backgrounds. Ink ‘lovelies’ from Giallo novels and posters float on top, with text from the video. As “film posters” they advertise the video in a wholly inaccurate and exaggerated way – staying true to the tradition of B-movies. Smaller drawings by Liu combine stills from Giallo films, compositionally ‘presented’ by the ladies of 1977 porn magazines. They present the promise of death, wearing Suprematist-shaped hats, coats, and elbows of deep space.

Baldessari’s original film, that forms the title of the exhibition and inspiration for Liu, will be screened at the gallery alongside a selection of available photo-based works by him that predominantly incorporate decontextualised expressions, such as Intersection Series: Landscape; Two Persons (One with Prize), 2002 which features two smiling faces juxtaposed with a hand holding a ‘prize’ and a photograph of a landscape. The hole within the landscape echoes the mouths of the women, whilst the red and green crayon in the central image relate us back to the films and the potentiality of violence or disruption within the subject and the image.

Baldessari’s sharp insights into the conventions of art production, the nature of perception, and the relationship of language to mass-media imagery are tempered by a keen sense of humour, reflected in Man with blue shape, 1991, which features a man’s frown, framed in a close-up, with the top lip painted blue and rendered slug-like. The mouth, the tool for communication, is abstracted and deconstructed, the expression within the image simultaneously forming and resisting narrative. Vertical Series: Books, 2003, the only ‘colour-less’ image in the show, connects to Liu’s incorporation of retro, sexualised images women, initiating, poised, cropped, re-configuring themselves and the context in which they occupy.

Baldessari references film in particular as “it mirrors the real world, but it’s in another place. It’s always set up” . In producing all aspects of her films (sets, costumes, lights, audio, editing), Liu is consciously constructing fictions that she uniquely extends through her drawings and paintings, literally ‘setting-up’ a parallel narrative in order to interrogate contemporary society.
CAUGHT RED HANDED / THINKING ORANGE / CATATONIC YELLOW / GREEN HORN / FEELING BLUE / APOPLECTIC VIOLET: DEATH WALKS IN HIGH HEELS!

Gallery Hours

John Baldessari (American, b. 1931) God Nose, 1965 Oil on canvas; 68 x 57 in. (172.7 x 144.8 cm) Private collection © John Baldessari

October 20, 2010–January 9, 2011 – The Metropolitan Museum of Art – New York
This is the first major U.S. exhibition in twenty years to survey the work of the legendary American artist John Baldessari, widely renowned as a pioneer of conceptual art.Baldessari (b. 1931, National City, California) turned from an early career in painting toward photographic images that he combined with text, using the freeways, billboards, and strip malls of Southern California as his frequent sources. In his groundbreaking work of the late 1960s, he transferred snapshots of banal locales around his hometown onto photo-sensitized canvases and hired a sign painter to label them with their locations or excerpts from how-to books on photography. Throughout the whole of his career, Baldessari’s sharp insights into the conventions of art production, the nature of perception, and the relationship of language to mass-media imagery are tempered by a keen sense of humor. The exhibition brings together a full range of the artist’s innovative work over five decades, from his early paintings and phototext works, his combined photographs, and the irregularly shaped and over-painted works of the 1990s, to his most recent production. A selection of his videos and artist’s books will also be included in the exhibition.

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Until September 12 2010 – Los Angeles County Museum of Art
John Baldessari is one of the most influential American artists working today. This long overdue retrospective will feature more than 150 works spanning the artist’s career from 1962 to the present day, and include works on canvas, photography, videos and artist’s books. Baldessari’s text and image paintings from the mid-1960s are widely recognized as among the earliest examples of Conceptual Art, while his 1980s photo compositions derived from film stills rank as pivotal to the development of appropriation art and other practices that address the social and cultural impact of mass culture. Throughout and continuing today, Baldessari’s interest in language, both written and visual, raises questions about the nature of communication. The exhibition is curated by LACMA’s Leslie Jones, Prints and Drawings, with Jessica Morgan, Contemporary Art, at Tate Modern. It will also feature a special installation conceived just for this retrospective.

Museum Hours