John Baldessari / Sculptures / Sprüth Magers
John Baldessari
Sculptures
Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles
September 11–December 19, 2026
John Baldessari is renowned for his brilliant visual experiments with language, photography, and painting spanning from the 1960s to 2020. Less explored is the artist’s creative use of three-dimensional space, whether by deploying patterned wallpapers, working in bas-relief, or creating captivating sculptures and installations.
By the 2000s, the artist had moved headlong into working three-dimensionally. The exhibition includes some of his first sculptures, including Beethoven's Trumpet (with Ear) Opus #127, 130, 131, 132, 133, 135 (2007), an interactive work reproducing the eponymous composer’s listening device and a massive, oversized ear.
Inspired by a visit to Beethoven’s home in Bonn, Germany, the sculpture plays fragments of his late string quartets—considered some of his most radical pieces and created when he was fully deaf—when approached and triggered by a visitor’s voice. Not only does the work fill the exhibition space with embodied, sculptural form, it also charges it with sound.
Body parts were a quintessential feature throughout Baldessari’s œuvre, whether through their omission, as with his celebrated dots covering figures’ faces, or through their fragmentation. Shapely, sensory, and ultimately funny, they offered the artist a shorthand to examine how we experience the world and make meaning.
In the major installation Brain/Cloud (Two Views): with Palm Tree and Seascapes, also from 2009, a massive white brain sculpture emerges from a plane of bright blue. Stretching across an adjacent wall is a serene seascape with one lone palm tree, its static, photographic flatness offering a counterpoint to the bulbous form nearby.
Keeping with the bodily themes, for the series Raised Eyebrows/Furrowed Foreheads (2008–09) Baldessari taps into the sensuality of the eye—the supposed window to the soul—and exploits the expressive, humorous nature of the eyebrow and forehead. Like many of his works, the series begins with found film stills and photographs, which the artist fragments and manipulates. Using an array of vivid colors and levels of bas-relief, Baldessari accentuates the lines and creases of various faces, as well as their emotional charge.
In the 2010s, the final decade of his life, Baldessari embarked on a group of freestanding sculptures that brought his work fully into three dimensions. Fabricated from painted polyurethane and metal, among other materials, these works present realistic depictions of animals and objects that nonetheless traffic in the artist’s characteristic wittiness and irreverence.
More than just visually appealing, these works give physical form to the verbal, visual and aesthetic strategies that Baldessari explored for decades in a range of mediums. They engage us physically while disrupting how we view and understand images and objects, leaving a visceral impression that also revels in drama and delight.
