Joseph Kosuth (Toledo, 31 January 1945), one of the pioneers of conceptual and installation art, has been working on works and appropriation strategies based on these languages since the 1960s. His work delves into the emergence and role of language and its meaning in art. Read the full biography
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Joseph Kosuth (Toledo, 31 January 1945), one of the pioneers of conceptual and installation art, has been working on works and appropriation strategies based on these languages since the 1960s. His work delves into the emergence and role of language and its meaning in art. From 1955 to 1962 he studied at the Toledo School of Painting. 1963-1964 at the Cleveland Institute of Art and 1965-1967 at the New York School of Visual Arts. In 1965, his first conceptual work "One and Three Chairs" appeared, which showed a chair as a real object, a photograph and a lemma photograph in an expanded vocabulary. 1967 First solo exhibition at the Museum of General Art, New York. Professor at the New York School of Visual Arts since 1968. 1969-1970 Editor-in-chief of the magazine "Art-Language", writes several theoretical works on the topic of conceptual art. 1971-1972 Studied philosophy. 1972-1982 Participates in Documenta 5-7 in Kassel. 1975 Founding of "Fox" magazine. 1992 Installation of Documenta-Flànerie at Documenta 9 in Kassel. Kossuth is an important representative of analytical conceptual art. Joseph Kosuth was a very important key figure in the redefinition of the concept of a work of art that occurred in the 1960s and 1970s with the formation of conceptual art, which investigated traditional art forms and practices and related theories and questions. His artistic training expanded with the study of anthropology and philosophy, with a particular focus on the work of the philosopher of language Ludwig Wittgenstein. Much of his art, closely linked to theoretical studies, consists of combinations of objects and words: for example, in the famous Three Chairs in One (1965, private collection), a photograph of a chair is placed in a Next to a real chair . Chairs, in turn, placed on the wall with the definition of "chair" taken from the dictionary.
