Cirrus is pleased to announce the exhibit of John Baldessari’s “Hegel’s Cellar”, a 1986, portfolio of 10 etchings, acquaints, photogravures, spit bites, soft ground etchings, and dry points.
Hegel lectured on Aesthetics, the topic of the realm of the beautiful, more precisely, their province as art, or rather fine art. It appears Hegel places fine art between pure thought and what is merely external, sensuous, and the transient between nature and finite reality, and the infinite freedom of conceptual thinking.
John Baldessari has been called a conceptual artist and a founding member of that 70’s movement, although he has also said that he finds the term “a little boring” maybe a bit limiting. His practice includes paintings, prints, performance, video, artists books, film, installations, and photomontages created with a pastiche of found images.
“Hegel’s Cellar” is a classic example of John’s use of photomontage, with the combinations of various print making techniques. Beautifully composed the prints also speak to John’s later comment that he is coming out of the closet, and he is a formalist artist, that the meaning of the images contained in a work are left up to the viewer to assess their meaning.
Internationally recognized and widely exhibited, Baldessari addressed the social and cultural impact of mass culture, and reinvented the terms of display and image making throughout his career. He received his Bachelor of Arts in 1953 at San Diego State College. He studied art history at UC Berkeley and received his MFA in painting at San Diego. He taught at CalArts (1970-1988) and
(UCLA 1996-2007). John mentored generations of students and was a pivotal presence in the arts in Los Angeles.
