John Baldessari: Miro and Life in General

A new series of works by John Baldessari – Miro and Life in General.  Throughout his career, John Baldessari has explored the correlations and contrasts between painting and photography and between image and language.  Beginning with his early text and photo-text paintings from the 1960s he has explored these dichotomies through hybrid compositions of photography, text and painted images. In the last five years, Baldessari has turned his focus to the art historical canon and he has made the medium of painting the central subject of his work, juxtaposing images from 15th-20th century paintings with texts from art history, popular music and film noir, in order to deduce new meaning from art history and to create new ways of seeing.

In this news series, he continues his investigation into the history of painting. Each work features a detail from one particular Miro painting and pairs it with a seemingly incongruous classic Hollywood film still which Baldessari refers to as ‘Life in General’.