John Baldessari, Pure Beauty, Tate Modern

John Baldessari is a major conceptual artist living in Los Angeles. The show is a retrospective, including works from the 1960s to 2009. John Baldessari’s practice takes a new turn in 1970 with the Cremation Project, in which the artist burns his former works. He makes tabula rasa. The display pays tribute to the artist’s formal simplicity. Years after years, all his experiments seem to gather on his latest works, the mix of photographs and painting, the use of color, the mutiple frames. It is a very coherent whole. The exibition contrast with Pop Life, next door. John Baldessari’s practice differs from Warhol’s. The Californian artist intend to remove himself from the act of painting, by hiring a sign painter. He hides his face behind a hat for selfportraits, whereas the Newyorker spreads his signature as much as he can. In two opposite ways, both artists challenge the power of images. Tate plays contrast, and displays two radically different sides of today’s art.

http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/johnbaldessari/default.shtm