John Baldessari

American (born 1931)

Born in National City, California in 1931, Baldessari studied art at San Diego State College from 1949-1957, also attending the University of California, Berkeley and the University of California, Los Angeles during 1954 and 1955. He developed his painting style, incorporating letters, photographs and words and by 1966 he was using photographs and text on canvas.

Baldessari's first one-man exhibition was at the Art Center in La Jolla, California in March of 1960. Since then, he has been included in hundreds of solo and group exhibitions and has received several lifetime achievement awards, including the Governor's Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Visual Arts in California in 1997 and the Oscar Kokoschka Prize in Austria in 1996.