John Baldessari
Parables, Fables and Other Tall Tales
Centre for Fine Arts – BOZAR, Brussels
September 19, 2025–January 25, 2026

John Baldessari (1931–2020) was a giant of contemporary art, whose codes he turned upside down. This autumn, Bozar is offering an essential insight into his work, a must for anyone wanting to grasp the subtleties of the avant-garde in the second half of the 20th century. This first retrospective since his death will focus more specifically on his work during the 1980s, which was also the decade of profound breakthroughs that saw the artist emancipate himself from convention. Known for his assemblages of cropped and colorized photos and films, Baldessari constantly blurred visual boundaries, questioning artistic practice and teaching. An influential artist on the contemporary art scene, he introduced a complex narrative tinged with humor, creating a new visual alphabet that influenced both North America and Europe. The exhibition will explore and illustrate the impact of his work, and its relevance to generations born in the digital age.

John Baldessari
Ahmedabad 1992
September 14–November 2, 2024
Berlin

Throughout John Baldessari’s prolific and impactful career, he consistently examined and defied the expectations that influence our perception of art. His unique methodology in the realms of painting, photography, source materials, and text redefined and challenged conventional art historical limitations, making him a pioneer of American Conceptualism. Drawing from a wide range of sources – advertising, film culture, Marcel Duchamp, and Ludwig Wittgenstein – he created absurdist, complex yet accessible juxtapositions. Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers are pleased to present the second iteration of Ahmedabad 1992, a solo exhibition of an alluring series of mixed media assemblages Baldessari produced during his residency in India. For the first time in decades, a selection from this unique period in the artist’s oeuvre was initially shown during summer 2024 at the London gallery. Introducing the body of work to Berlin viewers, Ahmedabad 1992 will travel to the gallery’s German space for Berlin Art Week. An accompanying catalogue will be published to mark the occasion.

John Baldessari
Ahmedabad 1992
May 31–July 27, 2024
London

John Baldessari, a pioneer of American Conceptualism, continually challenged clichés and explored the expectations that shape how we perceive works of art. Throughout his storied and influential career, his distinctive approach to painting, photography, source images and texts recontextualized art-historical narratives and rejected traditional boundaries. Drawing from a breadth of sources – advertising, film culture, Marcel Duchamp, and Ludwig Wittgenstein – he created absurdist, complex yet accessible juxtapositions. Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers are pleased to present Ahmedabad 1992, a solo exhibition of an alluring series of mixed media assemblages Baldessari produced during his residency in India. For the first time in decades, a selection from this unique period in the artist’s oeuvre will be on view at the London gallery.

Mondi Possibili
Henni Alftan, John Baldessari, Cao Fei, Thomas Demand, Thea Djordjadze, Lucy Dodd, Robert Elfgen, Peter Fischli David Weiss, Sylvie Fleury, Jenny Holzer, Donald Judd, Karen Kilimnik, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, David Ostrowski, Michail Pirgelis, Sterling Ruby, Thomas Scheibitz, Andreas Schulze, Hyun-Sook Song, Robert Therrien, Rosemarie Trockel, Kaari Upson, Andrea Zittel
August 31–September 14, 2023
Seoul

Mondi Possibili highlights the interplay between art and design and explores the many ways in which experimentation with material, technique and scale can reveal the hidden narratives, quiet drama and humor in the everyday items that furnish our lives as well as our imaginations. Connected through a paradigm of the possible, all artworks on show examine familiar objects – citing, celebrating, adapting or appropriating them – offering surprising, playful or unsettling approaches that open up a range of “possible worlds.” This will be the fourth edition of Sprüth Magers’ Mondi Possibili – first titled by Pasquale Leccese – showcasing significant themes in the selected artists’ works as well as the gallery’s longstanding heritage. Its three previous iterations were presented in 1989, 2006 and 2007 in Cologne, where the gallery’s history is firmly rooted, and art and design have intersected for many decades.

John Baldessari
The Story Underneath
September 9–October 29, 2022
New York

Sprüth Magers is pleased to announce the inaugural exhibition at its New York space, a presentation of over seventy-five of John Baldessari’s maquettes dating from the early 1980s to the 2000s, curated by Nana Bahlmann. Created as preparatory works and sketches for his celebrated large-scale pieces, these dynamic works on paper contain and reveal the artist’s original source materials from his vast image collection, from which he freely extracted, combined and thus re-contextualized elements to create his works. Together, the maquettes grant extraordinary insight into Baldessari’s inspiring way of seeing and distinct image-making process.

John Baldessari
The Space Between
June 12–September 11, 2021
Los Angeles

The exhibition presents John Baldessari’s final series of thirty paintings, The Space Between (2019), that demonstrate the artist’s characteristic combining of text and image. Through spatial overlays and excisions, the works at once deflect and direct our attention, while also betraying the processes by which we encode and decode the world around us. Simultaneously banal, surprising and poignant, Baldessari’s last works beautifully encapsulate the thrust of his artistic project as a whole: to explore the amorphous spaces between things, people and ideas.

GO FIGURE!?
Henni Alftan, John Baldessari, Cao Fei, George Condo, Diane Dal-Pra, Thomas Demand, Alex Foxton, Lenz Geerk, Elizabeth Glaessner, Matthew Angelo Harrison, Oscar yi Hou, Gary Hume, Clementine Keith-Roach, Karen Kilimnik, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Jo Messer, Pamela Rosenkranz, Sterling Ruby, Thomas Scheibitz, Cindy Sherman, Rosemarie Trockel, Kara Walker, Andro Wekua
May 19–May 26, 2021

GO FIGURE!? is an online exhibition in collaboration with Ed Tang and Jonathan Cheung. It presents works by artists from Sprüth Magers roster alongside a selection of emerging artists from around the globe and across various media, aiming to welcome a playful dialogue between the exhibiting artists and works.

John Baldessari
October 27–December 9, 2017
Los Angeles

The exhibition features twenty-seven works from Baldessari’s new series of large-scale paintings based on the ubiquitous Emojis. From his earliest text paintings in the late 1960s to his more recent ‘storyboard paintings’, he has always reveled in the playful dislocation between text and image, expanded here in this most recent body of work. Created earlier this year, the Emoji paintings focus on the increasingly complex ways in which we exchange and interpret information in everyday life. Emojis’ are a pictograph-specific keyboard that features glyphs in categories such as ‘smileys and people’, ‘animals and nature’, ‘food and drink’, ‘objects’, and ‘flags’. They are increasingly used as a form of electronic communication, but their equivocal nature means that issues of context and cultural specificity often complicate their interpretation by recipients – it is this theme that the artist explores in his paintings. 

John Baldessari
February 24–April 9, 2016
Los Angeles

Sprüth Magers has been exhibiting John Baldessari for almost 30 years, and we are delighted to open our Los Angeles gallery with one of the west coast’s greatest living artists. Featuring banal found photographs, altered with his trademark blocks of rich colour, accompanied by equally banal snippets of text that appear like captions beneath the images, the new paintings present the viewer with a pleasing conundrum. Text and image are sutured together on the picture plane, yet the viewer will struggle to find any useful correspondence between them.

John Baldessari
Storyboard (in 4 Parts)
September 14–November 2, 2013
Berlin

John Baldessari's uninhibited and tabooless perspective onto art and the world in which it arises, along with his ambivalent attitude toward painting, Concept Art, and Appropriation Art, have had an enduring influence on several generations of visual artists – from David Salle and Jack Goldstein to Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger. The storyboard canvases on display here, measuring up to 2.60 meters in height, were printed in an inkjet process and overpainted with acrylic by Baldessari here and there. Each storyboard consists of two photographs ripped out of newspapers and magazines, a text panel which may implant a scene in the head of the viewer, and a color chart which takes up the hues of the individual pictorial elements.

John Baldessari
Double Feature
September 23–October 29, 2011
Berlin

Baldessari's focus on allegorical and iconographical traditions is recognizable in his new work-group Double Feature:. What is significant of these image-text montages is the utilization of concrete pictorial motifs from the history of modern art from Henri Matisse, Kurt Schwitters, and Max Ernst, all the way to Francis Picabia. From these models, Baldessari extracts in his customary manner selected elements which are printed onto canvas and are individually overpainted by himself. Oscillating between collage and painting, Baldessari's versions do not consist of decontextualized copies but instead present autonomous originals which repeat painting and its forms of appearance from a different perspective.

John Baldessari
Hands and/or Feet (Part Two)
November 20, 2009–January 16, 2010
Berlin

Widely considered one of the most influential artists of the last forty years and one of the founding fathers of conceptual art, Baldessari has with this new exhibition both returned to his characteristic strategy of utilising and embellishing found visual material and extended his interest in the physical form and social meaning of particular parts of the human body. Each of the ten large-scale works is composed as a diptych of found photographs or media images including hands and/or feet.

John Baldessari
Ear Sofa; Nose Sconces with Flowers (In Stage Setting)
October 12–November 14, 2009
London

Ear Sofa; Nose Sconces with Flowers (In Stage Setting) is the first ever tableau vivant created by acclaimed American artist John Baldessari, a living installation which epitomises the wry wit, visual ingenuity and conceptual vigour which has defined the artist’s practice for almost five decades. The installation centres on an ear-shaped sofa, on which a model sits, posed and poised, flanked on either side by a pair of nose-shaped, wall-mounted sconces. The sofa is framed by a large decorative semi-circular arch, and the gallery’s glass frontage is shrouded by a sheet of sheer stretched silk.

Source Codes
Kenneth Anger, Richard Artschwager, John Baldessari, Bruce Conner, Richard Hamilton, David Lamelas, Richard Prince, Ed Ruscha, Lucas Samaras, John Stezaker, Paul Thek
June 26–August 29, 2009
Berlin

Source Codes juxtaposes a selection of works by a number of artists and filmmakers from Europe and America who mapped essential conceptual groundwork in the 1960s and 1970s and whose work remains influential to many artists today By examining new ways to rethink and translate visual information and cultural codes in the gaps between Minimalism and Pop Art, and through an interest in process-based performative practice, their work has exerted significant influence on younger artists in a variety of ways.

Uneasy Angel / Imagine Los Angeles
Doug Aitken, John Baldessari, Patterson Beckwith, Lecia Dole-Recio, Jack Goldstein, Richard Hawkins, Patrick Hill, Sister Corita Kent, Norman M. Klein, Barbara Kruger, David Lamelas, John McCracken, Matthew Monahan, Lari Pittman, Sterling Ruby, Allen Ruppersberg, Lara Schnitger, Kim Schoenstadt, Paul Sietsema, Catherine Sullivan, Robert Therrien, Pae White
curated by Johannes Fricke Waldthausen
September 14–November 3, 2007
Munich

Uneasy Angel / Imagine Los Angeles is a thematic exhibition comprising the creative production of contemporary artists, writers, and filmmakers living and working in Los Angeles. In light of Umberto Eco’s and Jean Baudrillard’s notion of hyperreality, the exhibition perceives Los Angeles as just such a place—with unclear boundaries separating reality and the imaginary.

John Baldessari
Prima Facie (Fifth State)
April 28–June 24, 2006
London

John Baldessari holds a truly influential and pioneering position in contemporary art. He rose to prominence in the late 1960s and set about re-positioning art, particularly painterly abstraction by adopting appropriated imagery from the mass media with linguistic investigations on canvas.

John Baldessari
Junctions and Intersections
October 31, 2002–February 28, 2003
Cologne

The exhibition includes works from the INTERSECTION SERIES, on which Baldessari has been working since the beginning of the year. He takes found pictures of different provenance, arranges them in cross and T-shapes and in this way overlaps, i.e. formally crosses, as in a double exposure, manifesting a new level, which he reworks with painterly means.

John Baldessari
Trying to look between things instead of at things
June 2–July 31, 2001
Munich

John Baldessari
The Commissioned Paintings
September 11–October 16, 1999
Cologne

John Baldessari
NATIONAL CITY. Paintings from 1967 and 1996
May 23–July 31, 1997
Cologne

"Living in National City and working in a studio with no windows, I had a lot of time to think about things and the state of art, and one of the things I began thinking about – probably coming out simultaneously from teaching – was the function of art. When I say 'function', it's interesting because I had this social conscience about trying to find some sort of life's work that would make some sense to me and the world. Not that what I need is some social fulfillment that I did somebody some good – I can never be convinced that art did anybody any good – but I was thinking in that direction."

John Baldessari
September 15–November 4, 1995
Cologne

Tutto Tondo
Curtis Anderson, Guglielmo Aschieri, Donald Baechler, John Baldessari, Ilaria Bona, Angela Bulloch, George Condo, Walter Dahn, Jürgen Drescher, Peter Fend, Peter Fischli David Weiss, Anne Loch, Piero Manzoni, Annette Messager, A. R. Penck, Gerhard Richter, Salvo, Andreas Schulze, Rosemarie Trockel
February 4–March 13, 1993
Cologne

Baldessari, Bernard, Fischli & Weiss, Perlman
John Baldessari, Cindy Bernard, Peter Fischli David Weiss, Hirsch Perlman
March 8–April 6, 1991
Cologne

Das Licht von der anderen Seite – Teil II Photographie
John Baldessari, Bernd & Hilla Becher, Anna & Bernhard Blume, Victor Burgin, Walter Dahn, Jimmy De Sana, Barbara Ess, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Peter Fischli David Weiss, Hamish Fulton, Günther Förg, Georg Herold, Martin Kippenberger, Imi Knoebel, Thomas Locher, Allan Mccollum, Sigmar Polke, Richard Prince, Ed Ruscha, Cindy Sherman, Jeff Wall, James Welling, Richard Wentworth
September 17–October 29, 1988
Cologne