John Baldessari: No Stone Unturned – Conceptual Photography
5252 Campo Santa Maria Formosa Venezia
May 6 – November 23, 2025
The Fondazione Querini Stampalia presents No Stone Unturned – Conceptual Photography, the most extensive exhibition ever devoted to John Baldessari in Venice. A towering figure in postwar art, Baldessari (1931–2020) dismantled and reassembled the visual vocabulary of the 20th century, fusing image and text, absurdity and insight, in a practice that made the everyday strange—and the strange, familiar.
This landmark exhibition homes in on a formative period in Baldessari’s career: his groundbreaking engagement with conceptual photography beginning in the 1960s. These works, at once playful and razor-sharp, interrogate the nature of seeing, the authority of language, and the unstable borders of meaning. With his unmistakable blend of wit, precision, and cultural critique, Baldessari reshaped how we think about images—and what they can do.
More than a retrospective, No Stone Unturned is a deep dive into the artist’s relentless questioning of art itself: a tribute to his enduring influence and to the radical clarity of a practice that left no assumption unchallenged.