With the exhibition No Stone Unturned – Conceptual Photography, dedicated to the work of John Baldessari and presented in participation with the Estate of John Baldessari, the Fondazione Querini Stampalia inaugurates a new chapter under the direction of Cristiana Collu. Vital and exemplary, the show marks the beginning of a new season for the institution. Opening on 5 May—on the birthday of its founder, Count Giovanni Querini—and in conjunction with the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, the exhibition has a deliberate, eloquent resonance, tracing what might be described as a temporal choreography.
John Baldessari (1931–2020), one of the most influential figures in conceptual art, spent more than seven decades reshaping how we understand what art can be. Drawing from everyday life and visual culture, he created paintings, sculptures, drawings, videos, and photographs that explored the tension between image and language, object and meaning—often with disarming wit.
This is the most extensive exhibition of his work ever held in Venice, focusing on a pivotal moment in the late 1960s when photography became central to his conceptual practice. Like Giovanni Querini, John Baldessari was a pioneer—an anticipator. His work continually reflected on the grammar of space: space to be deconstructed, recomposed, interrogated. Here, each work speaks a language that is both rigorous and playful, revealing a spatial intelligence that pulses through the rhythm of the images and the interplay of bodies, objects, and surfaces.
The subject matter of John Baldessari’s photographs was always straightforward, comprising objects he found in his immediate environment of Los Angeles, including the studio, while at home or while teaching. Yet what he did with them was far more complex. In his celebrated series of Commissioned Paintings (1969), he took photographs of a finger pointing at banal things in equally banal or undefined locations; then hired a photorealistic painter to repaint these images, and a sign painter to add a caption below naming the painter: “A Painting by Patrick X. Nidorf, O.S.A.,” for example. John Baldessari thus complicated not just the authorship and definition of a painting, but also commented on painting’s ability to focus attention and determine what is worth looking at—notions that are often given as fact, or go unnoticed.
After John Baldessari’s Cremation Project (1970), in which he ceremonially burned many of the canvases he had made before his conceptual turn (a project documented largely through photographs), he embarked upon a prolific array of photo-based series throughout the 1970s and early 1980s that took various approaches to the medium. For his project Police Drawing (1971), he investigated the notion of the photograph as evidence; after meeting a group of students who had never met him and video-taping the experience, a police sketch artist entered the room and created a drawing of the artist from their descriptions.
Other early 1970s works in the exhibition include videos such as I will not make any more boring art (1971) and Teaching a Plant the Alphabet (1972), which each present absurd situations and document humorous, mundane performances; as well as photographic series presented in grids and other visual arrangements that explore movement, language and, consequently, photography’s relationship to film. Many of the impulses behind these works came from assignments John Baldessari would give his own students at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), such as “How can plants be used in art,” “Defenestrate objects. Photo them in mid-air,” and “Describe the visual verbally and the verbal visually.” These writings and his teaching were key in the formation not only of his students’ practice, but also his own.
Works from the mid-1970s in No Stone Unturned include examples from John Baldessari’s Kissing Series, wherein the silhouette of a person abuts the edges of another object, “kissing” one surface to another, and emphasizing the importance of the spaces between things. In his Embed Series, he embedded words and images within each photograph, exploring the idea of subliminal images. The idea of a photograph as a code, or a means of decoding, also appears in the Binary Code Series, which presents sequences of actions—smoking a cigarette, for example—that ostensibly deliver a message, whether real or imagined. Each of these series, which set up juxtapositions and comparisons between objects, images and words, laid the groundwork for many of his John Baldessari’s celebrated wall works and painting series of the 1990s and 2000s.
The exhibition also includes a major presentation of John Baldessari’s fascinating Blasted Allegories, an expansive series from the late 1970s that combine photographs taken from a television screen, overlaid with words, in a lush array of colors and compositions. Taken with a timer, so as to remove the “hand” of the artist, each TV still was color-tinted and assigned a word by John Baldessari and other friends, based on the contents of the image. Using arrows and other symbols, he placed them in complex combinations that do not determine any meaning as much as they lay bare our deep-seeded desire to find meaning in everything we see. The artist defined this series as “bits of meaning floating in the air, their transient syntax providing new ideas.” Across No Stone Unturned, John Baldessari’s urge to provide new ideas in a generous and open-ended manner, particularly through his work with photography, is made consistently clear.
John Baldessari (1931–2020) lived and worked in Venice, California. Selected solo exhibitions include Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Atchugarry, Maldonado, Uruguay (2025), Fundación Malba–Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (2024), Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2020), Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach (2019), Museo Jumex, Mexico City (2017), Städel Museum, Frankfurt (2015), Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, Moscow (2013), Fondazione Prada, Milan (2010), Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2011) and Tate Modern, London (2009), which traveled to Museum of Contemporary Art, Barcelona (2010), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2010), and Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2010–2011). Selected group exhibitions include the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009) at which he was honored with the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, Whitney Biennial (2009, 1983), Documenta VII (1982), Documenta V (1972) and the Carnegie International (1985–86).
