John Baldessari: 'Crowds' Artist Reception this Saturday 5-7pm at FYA @ 6020 Wilshire Blvd.

John Baldessari: Crowds May 18 -June16, 2013 -

ForYourArt will host Mixografia‘s latest collaboration with John Baldessari. The featured series, Crowds with Shape of Reason Missing: Examples 1-6, 2012, examines the idea of removing the predominant subject of an image and replacing it with a nondescript white form. Baldessari chose vintage movie stills that seem at once recognizable and yet unfamiliar. The classic cinematographic images that once informed a clear storyline now raise more questions than they answer. The work depicts individuals gathered together in formation or haphazardly while captivated by the unknown. Soldiers, onlookers, harem girls and a wide assortment of people become participants in an event that was undoubtedly defined before the artist altered the image. The lack of closure in these reinvented images creates a tension that entices the viewer to project ideas and possibilities of what the amorphous white shapes may embody.

Over the past 18 years Baldessari has utilized the Mixografia printing technique to play with notions of texture, color and subject. Beginning in early 1993 Baldessari utilized the resources and technologies of the workshop, to re-define the relief print, first by ignoring the notion of volume altogether in his 2-dimentional deployment of a common table lamp rendered with its inherent shadow, and later by the embracing the variation in his picture plain by acknowledging a foreground-middle ground-background through the demarcation of relief with his work on Stonehenge (With Two Persons), 2005. Sailboat completed in 2008 emphasizes volume through paper sculpture. Baldessari’s A B C Art (Low Relief): A/Ant, Etc. (Keyboard), 2009 embraced the model of high and low relief generating depictions of food, body-parts, toys and sly popular culture references.

A selection of Baldessari’s 18 years of collaboration with Mixografia will also be on view at ForYourArt at 6020 Wilshire Blvd.

Learn More Here...