ALEJANDRO CESARCO & JOHN BALDESSARI: Retrospective

3 November — 11 December 2007
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Alejandro Cesarco and John Baldessari, have collaborated on Retrospective, a series of twelve silk-screens on aluminum works. Retrospective deals with the idea of looking back, how meaning is re-contextualized through memory framing, selecting, re-telling and continuance of a dialogue, history and the acknowledgment of influence. Implicit in the project is a concern for the difference created by retelling and representing the past in the present. The segmentation of history is an arbitrary and conventional matter, a story for making the present intelligible. What consequence does this have? Who narrates, and for whom? What is included and what is left out of this narrative?

John Baldessari was born in 1931, National City, CA. He lives and works in Santa Monica, CA. Acknowledged by many as one of the leaders of the Californian conceptual school of art, John Baldessari studied at San Diego State College, U.C. Berkeley, UCLA, the Otis Art Institute, and the Chouinard Art Institute. He has received a number of honorary doctorates and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004. His work has been exhibited in the 47th Venice Biennial (1997); the Carnegie International (1985-86), the Whitney Biennial (1983), and Documentas V (1972) and VII (1982), and he has had retrospectives at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1990-1992); the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien (2005) and the Kunsthaus Graz, Austria (2005). A major retrospective of his work will open at the Tate Modern, London in 2009. John Baldessari is represented by Marian Goodman Gallery, New York.

Alejandro Cesarco was born in 1975 in Montevideo, Uruguay. He received a B.A. in Economics (Montevideo, Uruguay) and an M.A. in Studio Art at New York University/International Center of Photography, New York. He has exhibited in galleries and museums in the United States, Latin America, and Europe. Two solo exhibitions in New York in 2006, at Murray Guy gallery and at Art in General, addressed his recurrent interests in repetition, narrative, and the practices of reading and translating. He has curated exhibitions in Uruguay, Argentina and Brazil and is the editor of Between Artists, an ongoing series of pocket sized, conversation based books published by A.R.T. Press, New York. He lives and works in New York.