Invited by Marie de Brugerolle, ten artists, from both sides of the Atlantic, look at the work of John Baldessari.
John Baldessari is one of the leading figures of West Coast conceptual art. Baldessari explores the language and culture of mass media in his paintings and photographic compositions, questioning the relationship between images and texts. An inspiring teacher throughout his career for several generations of artists, his influence is still felt today in both North America and Europe. Marie de Brugerolle brings together ten artists who illustrate the impact of his work on both sides of the Atlantic.
Marie de Brugerolle is an art historian, author and curator. Since 1994, she has been working on the development of the history of performance, from the '60s to its dematerialization or absorption into the society of the spectacle in the 21st century, with exhibitions such as Hors Limites: l'art et la vie, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 1994; Bruce Nauman, MoMA, New York, 1995; Not to Play with Dead Things, Villa Arson, Nice, 2008; Yvonne De Carlo, MUSAC, León, 2011; and she develops the concept of Post-Performance Future. She contributes to raising awareness of the Californian scene and its hidden history: Allen Ruppersberg, Magasin, Grenoble, 1996; Guy de Cointet, MAMCO, Geneva, 2004; John Baldessari, 2005 and Larry Bell, 2011, Carré d'art, Nîmes. Editor of Guy de Cointet's first monograph, JRP|Ringier, 2011, she is also the author of a large number of texts published in catalogs (Mike Kelley, Tate Modern, 2025) and magazines: Art Press, Flash Art, Artforum. She curated the exhibition Word is Round, Frac des Pays de la Loire, Carquefou, 2025.
John Baldessari (1931-2020) is a key proponent of Conceptual art and one of the most important figures in contemporary art of the last forty years. Since his sensational "Cremation Project" in 1970, which involved burning all the paintings he had made between 1953 and 1966, his work has revolved around the relationships between language and image as forms of expression. In his painting, photography, film/video, collage, and reliefs, Baldessari has explored the mechanisms of media representation, as well as the subject of artistic work itself. Early on, Baldessari began integrating images and text from advertising and movies into his works and building up a large archive of film stills, publicity, and press photographs. This image material is then contrasted, cropped, and processed in numerous variations and visual realizations. From 1980, the artist worked mostly without text in series of photographs and pictures, while continuing to deal with conflicts and constructions of narrative content. Over the course of his oeuvre, overpainting, voids, gaps, and withheld information increasingly take on the function of the language evoked within the viewer.
