NYAB Event - Joseph Kosuth "A Selection of Early Works from the 1960's"

Joseph Kosuth "A Selection of Early Works from the 1960's"

Sean Kelly Gallery

This event has ended.

Joseph Kosuth is the seminal pioneer of Conceptual art and installation art; in 1965 he initiated language and photo-based works, and appropriation strategies which he has pursued and developed over the last forty years. Kosuth made his first conceptual work Leaning Glass, in 1965. It consisted of any five-foot square sheet of glass which could be leant against any wall. An important four-part glass piece from this period will be presented in the exhibition, consisting of sheets of glass inscribed with the words Glass, Words, Material and Described. In 1966 Kosuth also embarked upon a series of works entitled Art as Idea as Idea, involving texts, through which he probed the condition of art. The works in this series took the form of photostat reproductions of dictionary definitions. An important six-part definition - Blue, Orange, Green, Purple, Red and Yellow - is included in the exhibition. Kosuth began producing neon works in 1965. Perhaps the most historically important neon he ever made - Five Fives (to Donald Judd), 1965 is incorporated in the exhibition. One and Three Shovels, 1965, is another key piece included in the exhibition. Kosuth described the process employed in the one and three works as follows: "I used common, functional objects – such as a shovel – and to the left of the object would be a full-scale photograph of it and to the right of the object would be a photostat of a definition of the object from the dictionary. Everything you saw when you looked at the object had to be the same that you saw in the photograph, so each time the work was exhibited the new installation necessitated a new photograph. I liked the fact that the work itself was something other than simply what you saw." Also on view will be the twenty-eight part work The Sixth Investigation, 1969, as well as the Information Room (Special Investigation), 1970, in which a library is organized together with contemporary philosophical and art-theory publications, presented for viewers on library tables. The totality of the exhibition is a reflexive discourse on the artist's early oeuvre and the revolutionary role he played in the groundbreaking reevaluation of art in the 1960's.