John Baldessari

John Baldessari (1931-2020) was an American conceptual artist whose wit and restless experimentation helped redefine what art could be. Born in National City, California, he studied at San Diego State College and later at several Californian universities, working for years as a teacher while painting in a relatively conventional manner.

His career pivoted in 1970, when he gathered his canvases, cremated them in what he called the Cremation Project, and baked the ashes into cookies. From there he turned to text and photography. His early text paintings featured blunt, deadpan statements rendered by sign painters, while his later work drew on film stills and found photographs, which he cropped, juxtaposed, and obscured with colored dots over faces. Those dots became one of his signature motifs, a playful way of redirecting the viewer's attention and questioning how images carry meaning.

Baldessari was equally influential as a teacher. He taught at CalArts from 1970 to 1986 and later at UCLA, mentoring generations of artists including David Salle, Mike Kelley, and Barbara Kruger, and he was known for encouraging irreverence and risk-taking in the classroom.

Major retrospectives were staged at institutions including the Tate Modern, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and LACMA. He lived and worked in Santa Monica and Venice, California, until his death in Los Angeles in January 2020, aged 88.