Joseph Kosuth

Joseph Kosuth was born 1945 in Toledo, Ohio (USA), lives and works in New York and in Rome. The American artist, one of the pioneers of the conceptual movement, initiated language-based works and appropriation strategies. His work has consistently explored the production and role of meaning within art. These three heliogravures quote a René Magritte painting, "L´apparition" 1928, in which amorphous elements are a repeated motif. These "clouds of language" contain the major concepts of Michel Foucault´s essay Ceci n´est pas une pipe of 1973, in which the French philosopher investigated the semiotic character of Magritte´s word pictures. Kosuth has described his projects as investigations which examine the conceptual and respresentational shifts between the identity of words and the reality of things.