With the exhibition No Stone Unturned – Conceptual Photography dedicated to the work of John Baldessari, the Fondazione Querini Stampalia inaugurates a new chapter under the direction of Cristiana Collu. Emblematic and necessary / Vital and exemplary, the exhibition marks the beginning of a new season for this institution. The inauguration is scheduled for May 5, the founder's birthday, Count Giovanni Querini, and in conjunction with the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, thus assuming an expressive and intentional resonance and tracing what we could define as a temporal choreography.

John Baldessari (1931–2020), one of the most influential figures in conceptual art, spent over seventy years redefining our idea of what art can be. Drawing inspiration from everyday life and visual culture, he created paintings, sculptures, drawings, videos, and photographs that explore the tension between image and language, object and meaning – often with a disarming spirit.

The one hosted at Querini is the largest exhibition ever held in Venice on the artist, and it focuses on a crucial moment, at the end of the Sixties, when photography became the focal point of his conceptual practice. Like Giovanni Querini, John Baldessari was a precursor, an anticipator. His work constantly reflects on the grammar of space: a space to deconstruct, recompose, interrogate. Here, each work speaks a language that is both rigorous and playful, revealing a spatial intelligence that pulses in the rhythm of images and in the interaction between bodies, objects, and surfaces.

The subjects of John Baldessari's photographs have always been simple: objects he found around him in Los Angeles, often in his studio, at home, or while teaching. What he managed to do with those objects, however, was much more complex. In the famous series Commissioned Paintings (1969), he photographed a finger pointing at mundane objects in equally mundane or undefined places; then he commissioned a hyperrealist painter to reproduce the image and a sign painter to add a caption with the painter's name, for example: "A Painting by Patrick X. Nidorf, O.S.A.". In this way, John Baldessari not only complicated authorship and the definition of a painting, but also reflected on the painting's ability to channel attention and determine what deserves to be looked at: concepts often taken for granted or overlooked.