Lot #PS001 John Baldessari Skateboards

“John Baldessari is an American conceptual artist born in National City, California in 1931.

Synthesizing photomontage, painting, and language, Baldessari’s deadpan visual juxtapositions equate images with words and illuminate, confound, and challenge meaning. He upends commonly held expectations of how images function, often by drawing the viewer’s attention to minor details, absences, or the spaces between things. By placing colorful dots over faces, obscuring portions of scenes, or juxtaposing stock photographs with quixotic phrases, he injects humor and dissonance into vernacular imagery. His art has been featured in more than 120 solo exhibitions and 300 group exhibitions. This October John Baldessari’s retrospective “Pure Beauty” will open at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as will a solo exhibition at the Marian Goodman gallery.”