Pure beauty : John Baldessari

John Baldessari is an important American conceptual artists and the last member of the American postwar avant-garde. His large collages, created for the Frankfurt exhibition, draw on masterpieces at the Stadel, from Lucas Cranach the Elder to Maria Lassnig. A multifaceted opposition and juxtaposition of old and new art is revealed by the texts and photographs. By destroying all of his paintings created from 1953 to 1966 in 1970, John Baldessari (*1931) paved the way for an independent and unmistakeable pictorial style between painting and photography, text and image. He employs classic Modernist pictorial strategies such as montage and the integration of everyday elements in order to confront these with artistic practices of the post-war avant-gardes, such as discourses on consumerism and the media. Baldessari intertwines media and materials and thereby combines entirely distinct groups of artistic subjects. In the process, the unambiguousness of the pictorial language has given way to a multi-layered readability.