Beschreibung:

32 ULTIMATE John Baldessari Transform (Lipstick) 1990 Unique work comprised of two chromogenic prints with vinyl paint, flush-mounted. 186.5 x 171.5 cm (73 3/8 x 67 1/2 in.) This work is unique.
Provenance Sonnabend Gallery, New York Collection of Alain Dominique Perrin, Paris Phillips de Pury Company, New York, 27 Exceptional Photographs, 24 April 2007, lot 21 Exhibited John Baldessari Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris, 28 November 1991-11 January 1992 À Visage Découvert, Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, 18 June-14 October 1992 For the present lot Literature John Baldessari Catalogue Raisonné, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012, vol. 3, p. 269 (this work) Catalogue Essay ‘Something that is part of my personality is seeing the world slightly askew. It’s a perceptual stance. The real world is absurd sometimes, so I don’t make a conscious attempt, but because I come at it in a certain way, it seems really strange.’ John Baldessari John Baldessari's Transform (Lipstick), 1990, made its public debut in his solo exhibition at Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris, in 1991. The following summer, it was shown at the Fondation Cartier pour l' art contemporain in Jouy-en-Josas in the group exhibition À Visage Découvert, curated by Jean de Loisy. The show, which also included works by Francis Bacon Robert Mapplethorpe and Cindy Sherman was thematically centred on the human face in art. The present work was hung in the same section as Larry Rivers’s Parts of the Face, a Congolese initiation mask, and a Pakistani Gandharan sculpture. Seen together, these works explored the various ways artists deconstructed and depersonalised faces in order to create generic portraits devoid of identity. Transform (Lipstick) showcases Baldessari’s use of appropriated imagery, asking the viewer to read the work as a narrative whose separate parts point together to signify a meaningful whole. In the early 1970s, Baldessari became interested in film stills, realising ‘that people carry around ideas of movies in their head,’ and he could, ‘somehow, strategically trigger these associations in people’s minds, but maybe, somehow, warp the direction in which they were going.’ By the mid 1980s, he was experimenting with colour, incorporating oil tints, acrylic and vinyl paint into his works. He started painting circles over individual faces in the found photographs, eliminating their identity, and drawing attention to body language and positioning. The implementation of his signature dots provided ‘such a food of relief,' he said, 'you couldn’t believe it felt so satisfying to obliterate those people.’ In addition to eliminating the faces, he also placed different and at times oppositional images side by side in various configurations, creating a hybrid narrative. Baldessari has continued to build his meticulously catalogued archive of images, creating works that are riddled with puns and signs for the viewer to decode. Working in the tradition of the collage and the photomontage, Baldessari breaks down the pictorial narrative and asks the viewer to find new meanings both in the images and in the spaces between them. After receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1986, Baldessari gave up his teaching post at the California Institute of the Arts in order to focus exclusively on making art. By 1989, Baldessari was using colour photographs, reimagining his practice in a more contemporary context, while his painting evolved from dots to blocking off larger areas of the photograph, obscuring whole figures or objects. In 1990, his second major museum retrospective opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. That same year, Baldessari, then 59 years old, created 121 unique works, including the present lot. According to Briony Fer in the opening essay to Baldessari’s 2012 Catalogue Raisonée, it was in that year that the colour blocked figure became his primary device, which ‘is not surprising,’ she notes, since ‘after all it can obliterate or be seen through, cover up or reveal, act like an intruder into a picture or become a fugitive from it.’ Baldessari is interested in extremes and in dichotomies, in violence and in kisses, as evident in a large