The Expanding Field: MOCA's Collection from the 1940s to 1970s
Group Exhibition
MOCA, Los Angeles
Through September 20, 2026

Drawing from MOCA’s world-renowned, ever-growing collection of nearly 8,000 objects, this exhibition focuses on artworks dating from the 1940s to the 1970s and demonstrates the collection’s historical depth, commitment to artistic experimentation, and global awareness. Featuring recent acquisitions alongside beloved artworks that have long been mainstays of MOCA’s collection, The Expanding Field provides insight into art practice in the decades immediately preceding MOCA’s founding in 1979 and an outlook informed by the diverse cultures of Los Angeles.

Sea, Pop & Sun
Group Exhibition
Fondation Carmignac, Ile de Porquerolles, Hyères
Through November 1, 2026

The Fondation Carmignac presents Sea, Pop & Sun, a dazzling ode to the freedom and vitality of the 1960s and 1970s that summons the Pop spirit. The exhibition at the Villa Carmignac, nestling between pine trees and the sea, reveals sun-drenched, sensual, soaring works of Pop Art, which continues to radiate its electric energy today.

The exhibition reflects on a historical moment in which new social movements, changing moral frameworks, and the rise of the leisure society reshaped everyday life and visual culture.

John Baldessari
UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing
September 19, 2026–January 3, 2027

John Baldessari, a leading figure of American Conceptualism, reshaped the possibilities of contemporary art through a lifelong investigation into the relationship between image, text, and meaning. Trained as a painter, Baldessari made a decisive turn with the Cremation Project in 1970, in which he burned most of his early canvases. Thereafter, he would redirect his focus toward a more conceptual approach encompassing photography, film stills, video, performance, and collaboration.

Marking Baldessari’s first institutional solo presentation in China, this forthcoming exhibition surveys five decades of his artistic practice—from early experiments with text and image and playful video works of the 1970s, to his cinematic montages of the 1980s, psychological explorations of perception, and austere late works revisiting color, absence, and space. Alongside archival material, maquettes, and artist books, the exhibition highlights Baldessari’s distinctive wry wit and relentless drive to question authorship, narrative, and the systems by which art attains meaning.

Mindset Los Angeles – Frank Gehry and the Cool School
Group Exhibition
Marta Herford, Herford, Germany
Through January 10, 2027

Architect Frank Gehry’s thinking and work are closely linked to the influence of Los Angeles and its art scene. This comprehensive exhibition explores Gehry’s early artistic influences, which led to his revolutionary approach to rethinking architecture. The free-spirited environment surrounding the “Cool School” group, which established itself in Los Angeles from the late 1950s onward, was a melting pot of artistic (material) experiments, shaped by Beat literature. In this vibrant network on the California coast, an inspiring cross-disciplinary dialogue between art and architecture developed.

John Baldessari
The End of the Line
Pérez Art Museum Miami–PAMM
August 20, 2026–May 9, 2027

John Baldessari: The End of the Line unites 50 years of the artist’s work from the collection of Craig Robins, a friend, promoter, close interlocutor, and one of the most important collectors of Baldessari’s work. The exhibition spans foundational works from the 1960s and 1970s, the radical incineration of the artist’s own work, Baldessari’s serial approach to photography, and his lifelong exploitation of the interplay between imagery and language, ideas and text.

A pivotal figure in postwar contemporary art, Baldessari fundamentally redefined what art could be, shifting emphasis from craftsmanship to ideas, language, and systems of meaning. Emerging from Conceptual art in the late 1960s, he abandoned traditional painting to work with text, found photography, and appropriated images, often pairing deadpan humor with philosophical rigor to question authorship, originality, and how images communicate.

John Baldessari
Sculptures
September 11–October 24, 2026
Los Angeles

John Baldessari is celebrated for his brilliant visual experiments with language, photography, and painting. Less explored is the artist’s creative use of three-dimensional space…

10 Years LA!
May 15–August 15, 2026
Los Angeles

Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers are pleased to present 10 Years LA!, an exhibition celebrating the gallery’s decade-long presence in Los Angeles. Since opening its doors in February 2016, the gallery has featured solo and group exhibitions debuting new works by its iconic LA-based artists as well as major installations by artists from around the world, often bringing their work to the city for the very first time. Illustrating this expansive approach, 10 Years LA! fills not only the 10,000 square feet of the gallery at 5900 Wilshire Boulevard with works by a wide cross-section of Sprüth Magers artists, but also extends to the former Sizzler restaurant at 6145 Wilshire with an installation focusing on film and video.

10 Years LA! features the work of, among others, Kenneth Anger, Richard Artschwager, John Baldessari, Bernd & Hilla Becher, Gretchen Bender, Cao Fei, George Condo, Hanne Darboven, Thomas Demand, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Thea Djordjadze, Lucy Dodd, Peter Fischli David Weiss, Sylvie Fleury, Cyprien Gaillard, Gilbert & George, Andreas Gursky, Nancy Holt, Jenny Holzer, Gary Hume, Anne Imhof, Robert Irwin, Arthur Jafa, Craig Kauffman, Karen Kilimnik, Joseph Kosuth, Barbara Kruger, David Lamelas, Louise Lawler, Mire Lee, Anthony McCall, Robert Morris, Reinhard Mucha, Senga Nengudi, David Ostrowski, Otto Piene, Michail Pirgelis, Gala Porras-Kim, Stephen Prina, Jon Rafman, Bridget Riley, Pamela Rosenkranz, Sterling Ruby, Ed Ruscha, Analia Saban, David Salle, Thomas Scheibitz, Andreas Schulze, Cindy Sherman, Stephen Shore, Martine Syms, Ryan Trecartin, Rosemarie Trockel, Nora Turato, Kaari Upson, Kara Walker, John Waters, Andro Wekua, and Andrea Zittel.

Seriously.
Curated by Nana Bahlmann
November 21, 2025–January 31, 2026
London

Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers are pleased to present Seriously., a group exhibition curated by Nana Bahlmann, featuring over a hundred conceptual photographs, print media, and select films ranging from the 1960s to the present, which expose the absurdities of our world and its representations. Through visual wit, subversiveness, and even outright slapstick, these photographic experiments offer humorous conceptual investigations of how images are constructed and interpreted. Employing a range of strategies, from masquerade and role-play to the construction of inexplicable scenarios, unexpected juxtapositions, and idiosyncratic sculptural compositions, these works reveal the farcical and fantastical within the visual realm. In reframing our visual world through satire and playful mimicry, they create space for both reflection and amusement.

Seriously. features the work of, among others, Keith Arnatt, John Baldessari, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Lynda Benglis, Helen Chadwick, Robert Cumming, Thomas Demand, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Braco Dimitrijević, Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Tom Friedman, Dan Graham, Rodney Graham, Scott Grieger, Aneta Grzeszykowska, Sigurður Guðmundsson, Andreas Gursky, Barbara Hammer, Rebecca Horn, Douglas Huebler, Astrid Klein, David Lamelas, Louise Lawler, Tom Marioni, Anthony McCall, Jonathan Monk, Peter Moore, Bruce Nauman, Dennis Oppenheim, Charles Ray, Andrea Robbins and Max Becher, Thomas Ruff, Ed Ruscha, Cindy Sherman, Stephen Shore, Santiago Sierra and Franz Erhard Walther, Roman Signer, Laurie Simmons, Robert Therrien, Rosemarie Trockel, Keiji Uematsu, Ger van Elk, John Waters, William Wegman, and Hannah Wilke.

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
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!?
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
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
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
February 4–March 13, 1993
Cologne

Baldessari, Bernard, Fischli & Weiss, Perlman
March 8–April 6, 1991
Cologne

Das Licht von der anderen Seite – Teil II Photographie
September 17–October 29, 1988
Cologne