Performer and bouquet

George Baldessin, whose artistic career was short but highly productive, was born in Italy at the beginning of the Second World War, immigrating to Australia in 1949. Baldessin’s early formal training was in painting at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (now RMIT University), but he quickly developed a fascination for printmaking and sculpture, exhibiting in these media in numerous solo and group exhibitions over the 1960s and 1970s. In 1978 Baldessin’s life and career were cut short with his death in a car cash.

Throughout his career Baldessin had been interested in experimenting with the figure, often beginning a work with central figurative elements, which he subsequently changed and subverted to create more abstracted forms. The performer is a recurring motif in Baldessin’s sculpture and print works, with the performer representing a distanced form of humanity, standing in for everyone but not specifically referencing anyone. Performer and bouquet is one of Baldessin’s earliest aluminium sculptures and extends the artist’s exploration of the subject of the performer; yet, unlike earlier works, this performer’s visage has been replaced by a bunch of flowers, effectively removing all trace of personality and further objectifying the female body.   

Tansy Curtin, Curator, International Art pre–1980