John Baldessari – Hands and/ or Feet

John Baldessari's Hands and/or Feet: Two Bags and Envelope Holder (with Envelopes) (2011) is a signed archival inkjet print from his ongoing Hands And/Or Feet series, in which the artist isolates and recombines fragments of the human body to challenge conventional representation. By juxtaposing a vividly colored arm and hand with everyday objects against a stark black background, Baldessari creates an artwork that is both visually striking and conceptually charged, foregrounding gesture, selection, and the constructed nature of meaning.

Baldessari's use of bodily fragments removes any stable sense of identity or narrative, directing attention instead to gesture, color, and formal relationships. The artificially saturated hues contrast sharply with the photographic source material, a hallmark of Baldessari's late practice that underscores the constructed nature of images and their meanings. By pairing human extremities with banal objects, the print generates a subtle tension between agency and passivity, presence and detachment.

This fine art print reflects John Baldessari's long-standing conceptual concern with selection and exclusion—what is shown, what is withheld, and how meaning emerges from partial information. As the artist noted, his method often involves "establishing a set of conditions that make things difficult to occur, but not so difficult that they couldn't possibly occur." Here, association and dissociation operate simultaneously, inviting viewers to complete the image mentally while remaining aware of its deliberate incompleteness.

Hands and/or Feet: Two Bags and Envelope Holder (with Envelopes) exemplifies Baldessari's ability to transform photographic imagery into a rigorous conceptual statement, balancing visual immediacy with intellectual play. This limited edition print is issued in an edition of 40, hand-signed and numbered by John Baldessari.