On Baldessari’s final painting series, a perfect encapsulation of his lifelong exploration of the chasms between words and things

The 30 paintings on canvas by John Baldessari (1931-2020) compiled here explore the gaps in meaning between word and image, foreground and background, photography and painting, presence and absence. Quintessentially Baldessarian in their witty, sometimes absurd pairings of objects and text, they feature imagery from film stills and found photographs, partially covered by gestural fields of white-and-black paint that direct our attention to particular elements in each scene, while obscuring others. Certain themes reveal themselves across the series, including body parts, gestures and tools. Baldessari’s final series beautifully encapsulates the thrust of his artistic project as a whole: to explore the amorphous spaces between things, people and ideas. The book features essays by Russell Ferguson, curator, author and professor at University of California, Los Angeles; Hans Ulrich Obrist, curator, critic and artistic director at Serpentine Galleries, London; and artists Barbara Bloom and David Salle; along with a portrait by artist Catherine Opie.