30 Facts About Joseph Kosuth

Joseph Kosuth is a Hungarian-American conceptual artist, who lives in New York and Venice, after having resided in various cities in Europe, including London, Ghent and Rome.

In 1963 Joseph Kosuth enrolled at the Cleveland Institute of Art on a scholarship.

Joseph Kosuth spent the following year in Paris and traveled throughout Europe and North Africa.

Joseph Kosuth moved to New York in 1965 and attended the School of Visual Arts there until 1967.

Joseph Kosuth's elevation to a teacher was a result of Kosuth's outside activities, which included the co-founding of the Museum of Normal Art along with proselytizing and organizing artists in a direction which was later identified as the conceptual art movement.

Joseph Kosuth's analysis had a major impact on his practice as an artist and, soon after, on that of others.

Joseph Kosuth continued his work, writing, exhibiting and exhibition organizing and rapidly became acknowledged as one of the pioneers of Conceptual art and installation art; initiating language-based works as well as photo-based works and appropriation strategies since the beginning of his work in the mid-1960s.

Joseph Kosuth's activity has consistently explored the production and role of language and meaning within art.

Joseph Kosuth's career includes over 170 one-person exhibitions in museums and galleries around the world, twenty-two of them by the time he was twenty-five years old.

Joseph Kosuth belongs to a broadly international generation of conceptual artists that began to emerge in the mid-1960s, stripping art of personal emotion, reducing it to nearly pure information or idea and greatly playing down the art object.

In 1966 Joseph Kosuth embarked upon a series of works entitled Art as Idea as Idea, involving texts, through which he probed the condition of art.

Joseph Kosuth visited the Trobriand Islands in the South Pacific, and the Huallaga Indians in the Peruvian Amazon.

Joseph Kosuth found that he was, as he put it, "a Eurocentric, white, male artist", and was increasingly culturally and politically uncomfortable with all that seemed naturally acceptable to his location.

Joseph Kosuth spent time in the Peruvian Amazon with the Yagua Indians living deep into the Peruvian side of the Amazon basin.

Joseph Kosuth lived in an area of Australia some hundreds of kilometers north of Alice Springs with an Aboriginal tribe that, before they were re-located four years previously from an area farther north, had not known of the existence of white people.

In 1992, Joseph Kosuth designed the album cover for Fragments of a Rainy Season by John Cale.

Two years later, Joseph Kosuth collaborated with Ilya Kabakov to produce The Corridor of Two Banalities, shown at the Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw.

Since 1990 Joseph Kosuth has begun working on various permanent public commissions.

In 1994, for the city of Tachikawa, Joseph Kosuth designed Words of a Spell, for Noema, a 136-foot-long mural composed of quotes from Michiko Ishimure and James Joyce.

In 2009, Joseph Kosuth's exhibition entitled ni apparence ni illusion, an installation work throughout the 12th century walls of the Louvre Palace, opened at the Musee du Louvre in Paris and became a permanent work in October 2012.

In 2011, celebrating the work of Charles Darwin, Joseph Kosuth created a commission in the library where Darwin was inspired to pursue his evolutionary theory.

Joseph Kosuth has taught widely, as a guest lecturer and as a member of faculties at the School of Visual Arts, New York City ; Hochschule fur bildende Kunste Hamburg ; State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart ; and the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich.

Joseph Kosuth was unable to define art in so far as such a definition would destroy his private self-referential definition of art.

In 1969 Joseph Kosuth held his first solo exhibition at Leo Castelli Gallery, New York.

Joseph Kosuth was invited to exhibit at documentas V, VI, VII and IX and the Biennale di Venezia in 1976,1993 and 1999.

Joseph Kosuth continued to exhibit in Venice during the Biennale from 2011 onwards, with the European Cultural Centre.

For Fifteen People Present Their Favorite Book, a show mounted at Lannis Gallery, New York, in 1967, Joseph Kosuth assembled fellow artists Robert Morris, Ad Reinhardt, Sol LeWitt, Robert Mangold, Dan Graham, Robert Smithson, Carl Andre, Robert Ryman, among others.

Also in 1989 Joseph Kosuth curated the show Ludwig Wittgenstein Das Spiel des Unsagbaren to commemorate the 100th birthday of the philosopher, in which he showed numerous works by fellow artists.

Joseph Kosuth was awarded a Cassandra Foundation Grant in 1968, at the age of 23, as the choice of Marcel Duchamp one week before he died.

In 2003, Joseph Kosuth was awarded the Austrian Republic's highest honour for accomplishments in science and culture, the Decoration of Honour in Gold.