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Edition of 35
Overall composition, approximately: 52 x 70 inches (132 x 178 cm)
(Inventory #32762)
John Baldessari’s “Black Dice” is based on a promotional shot taken from a Midcentury film of the same name. The nine equal sections of Baldessari’s work are independent abstract compositions that, when assembled in a grid, become more identifiable and ultimately depict that single moment in the movie. Like a film broken down into stills, Baldessari has broken the single still down into sections. Baldessari believed that the source photo was a variable component of the installation, leaving the decision as to whether to include it up to the viewer, furthering the ongoing tension between parts and whole. Throughout his work, Baldessari broke imagery down into parts, expanded those sections’ potentials and then reassembled them to create both identifiable and also entirely new compositions where what was central could be omitted and elements on the periphery could take on heightened roles.
John Baldessari (1931-2020) was born in National City, California. He attended San Diego State Univeristy and did post-graduate work at Otis Art Institute, Chouinard Art Institute and the University of California at Berkeley. He taught at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, CA from 1970-1988 and the University of California at Los Angeles from 1996-2007.
Baldessari’s artwork has been featured in more than 200 solo exhibitions and in over 1000 group exhibitions in the U.S. and Europe. His projects include artist books, videos, films, billboards and public works. His awards and honors include memberships in the American Academy of Arts and Letters and in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Americans for the Arts Lifetime Achievement Award, the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, the BACA International 2008, the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, awarded by La Biennale di Venezia and the City of Goslar Kaiserring in 2012. He has received honorary degrees from the national University of Ireland, San Diego State University, Otis Art Institute of Parsons School of Design, and California College of the Arts.
Recent projects include exhibitions in New York, Europe, and Los Angeles; an exhibition at the Mönchehaus Museum Goslar (Goslar, Germany) in 2012; the traveling retrospective “John Baldessari: Pure Beauty”; an exhibition with the Fondazione Prada in Milan, Italy; installations at the Museum Haus Lange (Krefeld, Germany), the Temporary Stedelijk 2 (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) and the Manchester International Festival (Manchester, United Kingdom); John Baldessari: A Catalogue Raisonné, Volume One: 1956-1974 was published by Yale University Press in 2012.
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