Hands & Feet: Hands & Fish

View Similar Items

Phil Demise Smith - "When the Elevator Door Opens"

Amir Akhavan - "Cheetah (black & white)"

Amir Akhavan - "Portrait of a Lion (Green Ribbon)"

Pablo Vargas Lugo - Suite Ravensburg (Movimiento a la derecha)

Pablo Vargas Lugo - Suite Ravensburg (Movimiento a la izquierda)

Pablo Vargas Lugo - Suite Ravensburg (Cabezas)

Gary Hume - Falling Bear

Ken Price - Hermit Crab Cup

Gary Hume - Bird with Pink Beak

Dan May - Cat with a Habit /// Contemporary Animal Smoking Humor Screenprint Black

Dan May - Dog Face (Purple) /// Contemporary Pop Art Screenprint Animal Face Pet Black

Dan May - Reading Pig /// Contemporary Pop Art Black and White Screenprint Animal Funny

1 of 5

John Baldessari
Hands & Feet: Hands & Fish
2017

About the Item

7 color screenprint on Saunders Waterford 600 gm Extra Smooth paper, edition of 50, signed and numbered by the artist. - Known for using found, mass-produced source imagery, Baldessari recomposes carefully selected pictures, sometimes pairing them with text and often overlaying them with large dots and swaths of color to mask or bring attention to areas of detail. Having experimented with different methods of working for previous editions, Hands & Feet is a full circle return to the techniques employed by the artist in his very first series of Gemini prints, published in 1991. Much like the first series, which also incorporated tightly cropped selections from film images and newspaper sources, text is physically absent from the Hands & Feet works. But in the artist’s typical impish style, he’s communicating with a different form of language: one of gestures. In all eight pieces there are only two human faces – one obscured by a washed out white dot and the other cropped to the corners, the emotive sources of reference on the face (eyebrows, corners of the mouth) falling just outside the frame. Our attention is therefore directed at the gestures being made by various hands and feet which – voluntary and subconsciously -- convey as much as verbal or written language. What we do with our hands and how we present our bodies is an integral part of social interaction, informing others of (and giving a clue to) internal feelings and affecting social outcomes. Inferences of emotional states can be made based on the perceived posture or signal made: arms and fists up = a universal expression for success, of winning -- a hand outward = indicates desire -- the clenching of knees = discomfort. Baldessari reveals just enough of an image to establish the setting, cropping his material deliberately and hiding recognizable features. By choosing moments where the viewer can almost piece together the before-and-after scenes, pinnacles of intrigue, victory, possibility, each images is a singular moment of tension or action. Will the drink fall on her striking silk dress, or is she the one who has tossed the drink? Will he catch the ball and strike out the home team, or miss it and lose it all? Individually the eight scenes are seemingly obscure and virtually unrelated, however when examined together moments of repetition are apparent (if not blatant) in subject, shape, and overall composition. Formally, Baldessari also not only acknowledges the Ben-day dot, dither or moiré pattern that makes up his source material, but enhances and magnifies it. Get close enough and the image is almost indiscernible, allowing the viewer to get lost amongst the dancing dots. On piecing together meaning for his work, the artist says “For me there is an image junk pile, and I’m a scavenger. Images are like random words that one might cull from a dictionary, and I’m trying to put them back together in some way, reassembling them.” John Baldessari was born in National City, California in 1931. He attended San Diego State University 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 the 2014 National Medal of Arts Award, an award from the International Print Center New York in 2016, 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. He currently works in Venice, California.

Creator:
John Baldessari (1931, American)
Creation Year:
2017
Dimensions:
Height: 36 in (91.44 cm)Width: 17 in (43.18 cm)
Medium:
Screen
Movement & Style:
Contemporary
Period:
2010-
Condition:
Gemini G.E.L. is the publisher of this edition and all impressions sold from the gallery are a primary market sale.
Gallery Location:
West Hollywood, CA
Reference Number:
Seller: JBA16-53981stDibs: LU14922106433

Shop All John Baldessari

John Baldessari

Although Conceptual artist John Baldessari is best known for the richly provocative juxtapositions of photographic images and text that characterize his prints and paintings, he actually had something of a traditional art world upbringing — if such a thing exists.

Born in Southern California, Baldessari earned several art degrees, from art education to art history to painting. He also taught art at various institutions such as the California Institute of the Arts throughout his life. Among his many students were David Salle, Tony Oursler, Jim Shaw and Mike Kelley. While helping to shape the art world in Los Angeles, he simultaneously developed his own name as an artist.

In the 1950s, Baldessari’s works were primarily semiabstract paintings, but during the late 1960s, he began to distance himself from painting, as he bristled at the idea of limiting art to a single medium. Baldessari decided to take his career in a dramatically different direction. He burned all his paintings at a funeral home in San Diego, then incorporated the ashes into cookie dough, producing (nonedible) baked goods for an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

“It was a very public and symbolic act,” he said, “like announcing you’re going on a diet in order to stick to it.”

From that point on, Baldessari took on an MO of experimentation, dabbling in mediums from video to printmaking to sculpture. “I just stare at something and say: Why isn’t that art? Why couldn’t that be art?” he said in an interview in 2008.

The works for which Baldessari is most highly regarded, however, are striking collages of images and text — many of which are seemingly nonsensical — such as Tom’s Hand Grips the Steering, Wheel… (2015), in which the title’s text is displayed beneath a hippopotamus. As such is his body of work: bringing a sense of joviality to the sometimes too-serious world of Conceptual art.

Before he died in 2020, Baldessari was honored with the 2014 National Medal of Arts Award, the Americans for the Arts Lifetime Achievement Award, the Venice Biennale’s Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement and more.

Find original John Baldessari art on 1stDibs.