"Three Red Paintings," 1988
Opens June 27
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art hosts a career retrospective of the West Coast king of conceptual art. For 40 years — working with altered media images, videos, photography, paint and a deadpan wit — Baldessari has teased out the enigmas of how we see and think. One of his paintings from the 1960s consists simply of the words pure beauty in black letters on a white background. And somehow, it is.