John Baldessari at BOZAR

John Baldessari (1931–2020) was a pioneer of Conceptual Art, celebrated for fusing text, photography, and painting into new forms of visual storytelling. He once said, “I’m interested in what gets us to stop and look, as opposed to simply consuming images passively.” Throughout the exhibition at Bozar, John Baldessari: Parables, Fables, and Other Tall Tales, that spirit animates every wall, video, and caption — inviting viewers not to decode meaning, but to question how meaning is made. Featuring more than sixty works from public and private collections, including several significant works from the Craig Robbins Collection, the show immerses visitors in the witty, rule-breaking world of a man who turned the language of art upside down.

Curated by Rita McBride, Bartomeu Marí, and David Platzker, all long-time collaborators and friends of the artist, the exhibition avoids a linear path. Instead, it unfolds as a series of encounters — playful, cerebral, and often absurd. “The exhibition is not intended to be exhaustive,” says Marí, “but it represents the most relevant moments in Baldessari’s career.” McBride describes it as “immersive, not chronological but entirely experiential,” while Platzker reminds us that “John was, above all, a storyteller.”

That storytelling impulse is clear from the start. The exhibition opens with I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art (1971), a wry punishment piece in which Baldessari repeatedly writes the phrase on a wall. Elsewhere, Six Colorful Inside Jobs (1977) compresses six nights of a painter colouring a room — from red through violet — into a thirty-minute silent film, turning the act of painting into both process and performance. “When is one merely painting a wall, and when is one making a painting?” he once asked.

Later works push the boundaries of media and emotion. In the Prima Facie series (2005), faces are paired with descriptive words like Suspicious or Pleasant, exploring how we misread expressions. “Our judgment is prima facie — at first sight,” Baldessari explained. “Can one match accurately a facial expression to a word?” His Duress Series (2003) presents film stills of figures under stress, painted in single hues that transform anxiety into abstraction. Even humour has a place in his conceptual grammar: in Ear Sofa and Nose Sconces with Flowers (2009), domestic design meets surrealist anatomy.

Though Baldessari’s career was rooted in Southern California, Brussels was an early and enduring home for his art. He exhibited at Galerie MTL in the early 1970s and later with Galerie Greta Meert, where he showed until his passing. “The strong Belgian sense of humour resonated with him,” McBride notes. Platzker calls the BOZAR show “a homecoming in a city he was truly fond of,” one where his irreverent intelligence feels perfectly at ease.

Designed by the Brussels-based architectural studio OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen, the scenography offers a subtle frame to Baldessari’s bold compositions — each room punctuated by flashes of colour, collage, and visual wordplay. The exhibition is accompanied by a public programme of talks, performances and film screenings. “I think any good art is deceptively simple,” Baldessari once reflected. At BOZAR, that deceptive simplicity unfolds as a joyful challenge — to look again, to laugh, and to think.

Bozar Brussels

@bozarbrussels