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.
Sprüth Magers Lee is delighted to present Prima Facie (Fifth State), the concluding body of work from the Prima Facie series. This will be John Baldessari's first UK exhibition in a commercial gallery in over a decade.
Prima Facie (Fifth State) is the culmination of Baldessari's most recent investigations. The series has been developed and exhibited in varying stages with text, image and colour playing greater or lesser parts. Characteristic within each series is Baldessari's economy of means and distillation of key linguistic ideas paired with appropriated images of human faces. Prima Facie (Fifth State) makes a marked shift in the series with the introduction of the names of the paint that Baldessari employs in his work.
