John Baldessari’s The Concerto for Two turns the act of playing the piano into a visual score. Using a repeated black-and-white image of hands on the keys, arranged in a four-part grid, Baldessari overlays vertical bands of bright color—green, red, blue, orange, purple, yellow, grey—like a set of TV test stripes cutting through the music. The photograph becomes less about a specific performer and more about rhythm, structure, and variation: each panel is almost the same, but the color shifts change how we “hear” the image.

With his characteristic mix of appropriation, repetition, and playful obstruction, Baldessari treats the composition like a concerto in itself—theme and variation, call and response—inviting us to think about how pictures can perform, syncopate, and improvise much like music.