Stephen Kaltenbach is a trickster. The artist behind multiple identities, with many modes of making, he’s the author of a long con that is his own art historical legacy, all of which is on view in The Beginning and the End. If you haven’t heard of him, here’s a possible reason: This will be his first solo museum exhibition in the United States in nearly 40 years. Once a promising artist in the New York conceptual scene of the 1960s, Kaltenbach “dropped out,” moved back to California (he studied at UC Davis) and began making work in a very different vein: psychedelic paintings, populist public art, classical-tinged sculpture. But all of this was part of a larger, lifelong project to play with the reception and interpretation of authorship. In a talk given at San Francisco Art Institute in 2011, Kaltenbach explained the strangeness of watching one of his adopted identities develop as an artist—the work had gotten to a place where he was starting to like it. –Sarah Hotchkiss
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