1301PE is pleased to announce a two-person exhibition featuring new work from John Baldessari and Rirkrit Tiravanija.
John Baldessari's new screenprint, produced by Gemini G.E.L. and published by Brain Multiples, repeats a directive he has used throughout his career: "Learn to Dream." These words are placed across horizontal bands of yellow, black, cyan, and light blue, and rendered in the typeface 'Churchward Montezuma 96 Extra Bold' designed by New Zealand typographer Joseph Churchward. Baldessari has come back to this phrase multiple times in different formats: most recently on a billboard in New Zealand for ARTSPACE, and on T-shirts for the Trespass Parade in downtown Los Angeles. In contrast to the common characterization of dreaming as something that happens unconsciously, or when we lose focus (daydreaming), Baldessari encourages us to actively dream, to deliberately engage with the creative, the irrational, and the hopeful.
Rirkrit Tiravanija has produced a series of unique enamel paintings composed of text upon monochrome grounds – red, yellow, white, and orange. With a wry sense of humor, he selects phrases that point to a society under stress: "All You Need is Dynamite," "Police the Police" and "Up Against the Wall Motherfucker." Tiravanija presents this challenging content in a seemingly straightforward manner, forcing us to consider the complex relationship between substance and form, message and medium.
John Baldessari was one of the founders of the conceptual art movement in California in the 1960's. His art has been featured in more than 200 solo exhibitions in the U.S. and Europe and in over 750 group exhibitions. A major retrospective of his work, Pure Beauty, opened at the Tate Modern in October 2009 and traveled to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Museu d'Art Contemporani in Barcelona and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Baldessari was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 2009 Venice Biennale. His most recent exhibition at 1301PE, John Baldessari: Not Prints: Posters 1966-2010, was the first comprehensive exhibition of his artist-designed exhibition posters. The first volume of his Catalogue Raisonné was released in May 2012 from Yale University Press.
Rirkrit Tiravanija was born in 1961 in Buenos Aires. For over twenty years, he has focused on the social ties connecting audience, artwork and artist, blurring the boundary between art and life. He is on the faculty of the School of Visual Arts at Columbia University, and is a founding member of The Land Foundation, an educational-ecological project in Chiang Mai, Thailand. He is the winner of the 2010 Absolut Art Award and the 2004 Hugo Boss Prize awarded by the Guggenheim Museum. Notable exhibitions include On Air at the Centre Pompidou (2012), Less Oil More Courage at the Kunsthalle Fridericianum (2009), and retrospectives at the Kunsthalle Bielefeld (2010), Serpentine Gallery (2005), and Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (2004). He recently presented Soup / No Soup at La Triennale 2012 in Paris, for which he transformed the main nave of Grand Palais into a communal banquet featuring a meal of Tom Ka soup.
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Earlier Event: June 2
JORGE MÉNDEZ BLAKE: POEMS AND MONUMENTS
Later Event: September 29
KERRY TRIBE: THERE WILL BE