John Baldessari

LA artist John Baldessari isn't as known outside of the art world as he is within it, or as he should be. Over the past 40-plus years, as both artist and educator, he's pioneered a witty style of conceptual art, employing photography, film, paint and text, that explores how we ascribe meaning and authorship to our words and images.

This chronological survey highlights Baldessari's influence not only on the general development of conceptual art but also on later generations of artists. For 'A Painting That Has Its Own Documentation' (1966), Baldessari inscribes the exhibition details of the work onto canvas, adding information for each subsequent show. Since 2000 Elizabeth Price has similarly engraved the exhibition provenance details onto her silver-plated 'Trophy'.

In 1970 Baldessari stopped painting to focus on photography and film, but not before he had burned all his paintings in 'Cremation Project', exhibited as a bronze urn in the shape of a book with an accompanying affidavit. Tracey Emin also destroyed all her paintings prior to a change of direction in 1989.

In the 1990s Baldessari re-introduced paint, often to mask elements of a photographic image, particularly figures and facial features. More recent works move into large-scale sculpture and installation. But it's the work from the '70s and '80s that best demonstrates Baldessari's investigative games and processes; ten photos of the artist blowing cigar smoke to try to imitate images of clouds; another series of a finger making an aesthetic selection from one of three carrots; or shots of balls thrown in the air, displayed in horizontal alignment rather than by frame height. All are deceptively simple but revealing about how we view, order and understand the world.