Joseph Kosuth

(American, born 1945)

Joseph Kosuth is an American Conceptual artist known for his ongoing investigation into language and its utility within art. Through his text-based works and installations, Kosuth examines semiotic expression, as seen in his seminal work One and Three Chairs (1965), which consists of a wooden chair, a photograph of the same chair, and the dictionary definition of a chair. Like the work of John Baldessari and Daniel Buren, Kosuth takes art from the physical world into the realm of ideas. “When objects are presented within the context of art (and until recently objects always have been used) they are as eligible for aesthetic consideration as are any objects in the world,” he once mused. “An aesthetic consideration of an object existing in the realm of art means that the object's existence or functioning in an art context is irrelevant to the aesthetic judgment.” Born on January 31, 1945 in Toledo, OH, Kosuth studied at the Toledo Museum School of Design, the Cleveland Art Institute, and the School of Visual Arts throughout the late 1950s into the 1960s. After his first solo exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery and an appointment as the American editor for Art and Language journal in 1969, the artist began an anthropological and philosophical inquiry at the New School for Social Research that would carry over into his artistic practice. He currently lives and works between New York, NY and Rome, Italy. Kosuth’s works are included in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Tate Gallery in London, and the Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art in Budapest, among others.