The 1970s also signaled Baldessari’s turn to a wider range of mediums, including photography, video and printmaking, where he continued to push at the bounds and conventions of each. His videos, which often take the form of lessons and instructions, demonstrate his deadpan, wry humor and his ability to cut to the core of questions surrounding artistic representation and perception despite their simple, straightforward means. Baldessari’s photographs, in turn, exploit the format of the sequence as they study the potential for meaning-making, knowledge and beauty within even the most mundane moments and repetitive actions.

In the 1980s, Baldessari began to incorporate found imagery into his work, private snapshots or film stills from forgotten movies that he encountered at stores and swap meets around Southern California. The anonymity of these images brought the gestures, poses and archetypes within them to the fore—content that Baldessari mined both for its narrative and compositional potential. His multi-panel works from the 1980s and 1990s are iconic for their ability to direct the viewer’s gaze to what they might normally overlook, as well as for what became a signature element of his work: brightly colored dots placed strategically over figures’ faces, which at once mask and draw attention to the images’ protagonists and their body language.

Moving into the twenty-first century, Baldessari regularly featured body parts, isolated and highlighted from their original source imagery, in paintings, sculptures and large-scale installations. Noses, ears and other appendages float amid fields of color, calling forth a range of sensory and cultural connotations and bringing the viewer’s body into dialogue with those on display. Fragmentation had always played a role in Baldessari’s work, but here it became fodder for evermore clever and fruitful combinations of image and text, whether in the artist’s evocative titles or in captions below.

Art historical references also proliferated in the artist’s later canvases, juxtaposing fragments from other artists’ paintings with captions of single words or lines excised from movie scripts. At times these texts appear to relate to the imagery above them; elsewhere their association feels tenuous, but viewers’ minds still attempt to connect word to image, unable to quiet the urge to find meaning or narrative between them.

Both Baldessari’s and Sprüth Magers’ entwined histories with Los Angeles came together in February 2016, when the gallery inaugurated its Los Angeles space on Wilshire Boulevard with a solo exhibition of his recent work. A show of his inventive emoji paintings followed in 2017, and on June 12, 2021, the Los Angeles gallery will premiere Baldessari’s final painting series, The Space Between, completed in the months before his death in January 2020 at the age of 88. The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue, co-published by Sprüth Magers and Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, with contributions from Barbara Bloom, Russell Ferguson, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Catherine Opie and David Salle.