The narrative art of John Baldessari on show at Bozar until 1 February 2026

Brussels – The career of John Baldessari has always been characterised by a particular attention to storytelling. For him, the artist was a storyteller capable of transmitting experiences, knowledge and information to generations to come. 

Born in California in 1931, after an initial approach to figurative and abstract painting, he moved away from traditional means of artistic expression in the 1960s to experiment with the fusion of different techniques, thus creating his own visual language. 

And so it is that photography, text, painting, sculpture, video and artist’s books mingle in his collage and détournement works, taking his artistic expression to an original and strongly narrative level. 

“People thought I was against painting. I was not,” the artist explained. “I have always simply believed that art should be more than just painting. My aim has always been to attack visual conventions. My work consists of seeing the world sideways.”

True to this statement, Baldessari often opted for unconventional formats, mixed styles and techniques, revisited images from popular culture and explored the relationships between different categories of images combined.

 The show in Brussels, at Bozar, focuses mainly on his mature production, from the 1980s to 2000, when the juxtaposition of image and text became the focus of his research. A juxtaposition that, according to the artist, leads to the creation of associations of meaning open to every possible and free interpretation. 

This concept of interpretative freedom was always dear to Baldessari, even in his teaching career. He was, in fact, a teacher always ready to engage with young audiences and always willing to let his students interpret the stories without intervening too much in their understanding. 

The curators sought to adopt this approach by proposing an immersive and experiential, rather than chronological, route that offers the public the opportunity to explore John Baldessari’s visual and narrative universe freely.