JOHN BALDESSARI
Eden: Adam and Eve (with Ear and Nose) Plus Serpent.
Opening: February 9, 2007, 8 pm
Exhibition: February 10, 2007-March 18, 2007
Conversation with the press: February 9, 2007, 11 am
John Baldessari speaks at the Städelschule: February 10, 2007, 3 pm
PORTIKUS
Alte Brücke 2 Maininsel
60594 Frankfurt am Main, Germany
Telephone 49 69 962 44 54-0 Fax 49 69 962 44 54-24
We are very pleased that John Baldessari has accepted our invitation, resulting in the present exhibition at the Portikus. Baldessari has been developing his own style in video works, collages, and photography and text montages since the early 1960s. Like many artists of his generation, he focused on deconstructing a modernist idea regarding the autonomy of art.
Eden: Adam and Eve (with Ear and Nose) Plus Serpent, a new project developed for Portikus, draws on earlier works which already used the motifs of ear and nose as pictorial elements. The sidewalls at the Portikus display magnified sections of a female and a male head. Like reliefs, the two eyes and ears emerge from and are recessed into the wall, respectively, treating them as sculptural and photographic elements at the same time. The front wall displays an oversized black-and-white photograph of a snake held up by a person.
The snake motifs has appeared in earlier works by Baldessari such as the nine-part Shape Derived from Subject (Snake): Used as a Framing Device to Produce New Photographs, 1981, where, as the title indicates, it served as a formal means in an experiment with framing. Only the serpentine line determined the selection of detail. One photograph from this series shows the same picture of a snake that now reappears at the Portikus as a complete motif.
In more than one way, the exhibition points toward the incompatibility of purity and temptation, as described also in the Christian myth of the Garden of Eden. Baldessari employs the universal symbolism inherent in his motifs as a means of visual invention.
John Baldessari (b. National City, 1931) lives and works in Santa Monica, CA. He is currently Professor of Art at the University of California, Los Angeles, and taught generations of Californian artists at the California Institute of Arts, Valencia until 1990. Most recently, he curated Ways of Seeing: John Baldessari Explores the Collection at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC, and designed the display for Magritte and Contemporary Art: The Treachery of Images at the Los Angeles County Museum, Los Angeles.
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