Margo Leavin Gallery

EXTENDED THROUGH 14 JULY

Margo Leavin Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by John Baldessari titled Double Bill (Part 2). On view from 12 May through 30 June, this will be the artist’s twelfth solo show at Margo Leavin Gallery, where he has been exhibiting new work since 1984.

John Baldessari has been making art in Los Angeles for more than four decades, mining our collective visual culture and creating clever juxtapositions of language and form through a deft and considered appropriation practice. For Double Bill, Baldessari returns to sourcing imagery from fine art, done in his well known Goya, Elbow, and Tetrad series, and the image-and-text format first seen in the National City works of the 1960s.

In this new series, Baldessari pairs the work of two selected artists (such as Giovanni di Paolo with David Hockney, or Fernand Léger with Max Ernst) on a single canvas, further altering the picture plane by overlaying his own hand-painted color additions. Baldessari then names only one of his two artistic “collaborators” on each canvas’s lower edge, a playful omission that challenges the viewer to identify the missing artist and allows them to draw their own conclusions regarding the image’s authorship.

Baldessari’s major retrospective, Pure Beauty, opened at the Tate Modern, London, in October 2009 before traveling to the Museu d’Art Contemporani in Barcelona, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The first volume of his catalogue raisonné, which will cover unique works from 1956 through 1974, is being published this spring. Baldessari’s work was included in eleven exhibitions related to The Getty Research Institute’s Pacific Standard Time initiative, making him the most widely exhibited artist in the program. He will receive the Kaiser Ring Award in 2012 in Goslar, Germany and was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 2009 Venice Biennale.