John Baldessari, Christopher Knight at Hammer Museum on Tuesday

This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

Renowned conceptual artist John Baldessari and Times art critic Christopher Knight will participate in a discussion at the Hammer Museum on Tuesday at 7 p.m. The talk is part of the Hammer Conversations series and is free to the public.

Baldessari, who turned 80 this year, hails from the San Diego area and has spent much of his career in Southern California. His work appears in the most Pacific Standard Time exhibitions of any artist. PST is the region-wide series of exhibitions sponsored by the Getty this fall and winter that explores the Southern California art scene from 1945 to 1980. It opens officially on Saturday.

Tuesday’s discussion will focus on Baldessari’s life and art. A retrospective of his work ran last year at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and later traveled to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. The show was co-organized by LACMA and the Tate Modern in London.

In his review of the exhibition, Knight wrote that the Baldessari ‘has worked in the gap between paintings and camera images for the last 45 years. ... [He] is arguably America’s most influential conceptual artist.’

Among Baldessari’s best-known works are his numerous photographs with the subjects’ faces blotted out by brightly colored circles. His oeuvre also contains text-based art and video works.

RELATED:

Art review: ‘John Baldessari: Pure Beauty’ @ LACMA

From Baldessari to Teske, top 20 Pacific Standard Time artists

-- David Ng