Skip to Content
  1. All Artworks
  2. All Artworks
  3. Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line (Best of Thirty-Six Attempts)
-
Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line (Best of Thirty-Six Attempts)

John Baldessari

Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line (Best of Thirty-Six Attempts)

1973

24.2 × 32.3 cm

Ed. /2000

Location: Paris, France

https://www.artransfer.com/web/image/product.template/28784/image_1920?unique=3db916c

7,780 € 7780.0 EUR 7,780 €

  • Color

This combination does not exist.

Share by Email

Documents

  • Invoice or proof of purchase
  • Certificate of authenticity
  • Other documents

About the artwork

Produced in 1973, John Baldessari's Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line Best of Thirty Six Attempts is a complete series of twelve color offset lithographs on coated paper, each measuring 24.2 x 32.3 cm. Printed in an edition of 2,000 and accompanied by a title page and a justification page, the work documents a simple, repeated action of throwing three balls into the air in the hope of achieving a perfect straight line. Each image captures a different moment in this attempt, inscribing the photograph in a logic that is both conceptual and performative. With this minimal gesture, Baldessari subverts traditional expectations of composition and formal mastery, replacing the idea of perfection with a protocol based on chance, repetition and selection. The blue sky becomes a neutral space in which an ephemeral line is inscribed, underlining the tension between artistic intention and the contingency of reality.

Expert opinion

This series is one of the most emblematic works of John Baldessari's conceptual period, and perfectly illustrates his analytical and ironic approach to the image. By choosing to present the best attempt among thirty-six essays, the artist questions notions of authority, choice and validation in the creative process. The work is part of a key moment in the Seventies, when photography became a privileged tool for documenting ideas rather than traditional aesthetic objects. The large print run of 2,000 copies reflects Conceptual art's desire for dissemination, without detracting from the historical importance of the series. It remains a major milestone in the history of contemporary art, and is of definite museum interest for collections focusing on conceptual practices and the redefinition of the photographic medium.

About the artist

John Baldessari was an American artist born in 1931 in National City, California, and died in 2020. He is considered one of the leading figures of conceptual art in the second half of the twentieth century. His work, developed from the 1960s onwards, questions the very nature of the image, language and artistic authority, combining photography, text, painting and pedagogical devices. In 1970, he symbolically marked a turning point in his career by burning some of his early paintings, a founding gesture that asserted his determination to radically rethink the foundations of artistic practice. Baldessari is particularly renowned for his photographs and collages, in which colored dots mask faces, hijacking narrative codes and questioning the mechanisms of identification. His work plays on humor, absurdity and critical distance to deconstruct visual and institutional conventions. Exhibited in major international institutions and included in major collections, he remains a key reference for generations of artists who have explored the relationship between image, text and conceptualization.

Additional info

3x

OTHER ARTWORKS YOU MAY LIKE