Category: Artist
Nationality: American
Last Year: 88
It’s Baldessari Time: a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at Venice, followed by John Baldessari: Pure Beauty, a generous retrospective opening at Tate Modern this month. Wholly deserved (if belated; he’s seventy-eight), given that the Californian’s slyly comic conceptual strategies and legendary tutoring have inspired generations of artists. Baldessari’s last exhibition at Marian Goodman, in winter 2008, featured a lot of furrowed eyebrows that, the artist suggested, said: ‘Aren’t we all worried?’ His own frown is, assumedly, now turned upside down.