A Camel at the Needle’s Eye, Sprüth Magers Gathers John Baldessari’s Sculptures
Giant ears, raised eyebrows, a fake carrot and an albino camel trace John Baldessari’s turn toward three dimensions on Wilshire Boulevard.
Sprüth Magers opened Sculptures, an exhibition devoted to the sculptural impulse in John Baldessari’s work, with a reception on September 10 at its gallery at 5900 Wilshire Boulevard. The show runs through December 19.
Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers bring the projects together for the first time to show what the gallery calls his dramatic and often humorous manipulations of space and scale. The works run from 1997 to 2018, from the 72-inch-square photographs Plant (Rotterdam #2) and Lamp (Rotterdam #2) to Beethoven’s Trumpet (with Ear), a 2007 piece in resin, fiberglass, bronze and aluminum fitted with electronics, plus Fake Carrot from 2015 and Penguin from 2018.
The scale is the joke. Camel (Albino) Contemplating Needle (Large), from 2013, stands outside the gallery as an eight-foot white camel with bright blue eyes, Jody Zellen wrote for Art Now LA, and Fake Carrot stretches eight feet long. In a 2009 piece, a pillowy white brain morphs into a cloud beside a seascape with one lone palm tree, while a closed-circuit camera projects the viewer’s image onto the opposite wall.
Baldessari approached the form warily. “Sculpture has always scared me. Face your fears. For me sculpture’s the final frontier. I’ve never done it. I’m just trying to edge into it backwards,” he said. He also saw a gap in art history. “Eyes and lips were pretty well done by Magritte, Man Ray and so on, but for some reason noses and ears and other anatomical parts haven’t been addressed so much and I thought, well, a lot of work to be done there,” he said.
That taste for the ordinary runs through the show. “I like banal images and I can’t think of anything more banal than a palm tree and an ocean,” he said. Sprüth Magers is open Tuesday through Saturday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. and by appointment.
