Stuart Collection: John Baldessari - READ/WRITE/THINK/DREAM

By combining and colliding the unexpected, the US artist John Baldessari, born 1931, creates conceptual works that raise questions regarding what art is, how art is made, and what art can look like. After concluding in the 1960s that a photographic image or a text were more adequate expressions of his artistic intentions than painting, John Baldessari's practice took a new direction. Since then, Baldessari has combined subjects from the imagery of popular culture with linguistic examinations, creating works that challenge artistic norms and boundaries. This catalogue, published to accompany the exhibition at Moderna Museet, Stockholm, spans Baldessari's entire career and shows the breadth of his artistic practice: you will encounter paintings, photographs, the moving images and the traces of performative acts. The book also includes a wide selection of Baldessari's own writings from 1968-2011.

Burning his early paintings and producing his 1970 Cremation Project, John Baldessari embarked on a new quest to explore the relationships between painting and language, images and text, originality and authorship. This overview of his works up to the early 1980s, encompassing film, photography, and painting, show him rooting around with characteristic humor and poignancy.

Hans Ulrich Obrist met the old master of conceptual and media art several times, joined by, among others, the author Alejandro Cesarco. Baldessari gives insight into his multi-medial work and life. Again and again the discussion is about the interaction between text and image. He expresses himself precisely, critically and, as usual, with wit on issues such as the museum as institution, idea archives and unrealised projects, but also on his exhibitions of the past few years and retrospectives.