Joseph Kosuth (/kəˈsuːt, -ˈsuːθ/; born January 31, 1945) is a Hungarian-American conceptual artist, who lives in New York and Venice,[1] after having resided in various cities in Europe, including London, Ghent and Rome.

Joseph Kosuth attended the Toledo Museum School of Design from 1955 to 1962 and studied privately under the Belgian painter Line Bloom Draper.

[1] From 1971 he studied anthropology and philosophy with Stanley Diamond and Bob Scholte at the New School for Social Research, New York.

As Kosuth's reputation grew, he was removed from the student body and given a position as a teacher, by Silas Rhodes the founder and President of the school, in 1967.

This caused a near revolt of the faculty, as he had been a disruptive presence in the opinion of many of the instructors, several who had unhappily faced his questioning of basic presumptions.

Through his art, writing and organizing, he emphasized his interest in the dialectical process of idea formation in relation to language and context.

His writing began a re-reading of modernism, initiating a major re-evaluation of the importance of Marcel Duchamp and signaling the shift into what we now identify, in art, as post-modernism.

His earliest work, the Protoinvestigations, were done when he was only twenty years old and as they are considered among the first works of the Conceptual art movement they are included in collections such as The Museum of Modern Art, The Guggenheim, The Whitney, Centre Pompidou, The Tate Gallery, The Reina Sophia, Madrid, among many others, and constitute a youthful record in most of these major collections.

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.

He remarked in 1969: Kosuth's works frequently reference Sigmund Freud's psycho-analysis and Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophy of language.

Accompanying these photographic images are certificates of documentation and ownership (not for display) indicating that the works can be made and remade for exhibition purposes.

In the early 1970s, concerned with his "ethnocentricity as a white, male artist", Kosuth enrolled in the New School to study anthropology.

He visited the Trobriand Islands in the South Pacific (made famous in studies by the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski), and the Huallaga Indians in the Peruvian Amazon.

He 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.

Hung on walls, his signature dark gray, Kosuth's later, large photomontages trace a kind of artistic and intellectual autobiography.

Each consists of a photograph of one of the artist's own older works or installations, overlaid in top and bottom corners by two passages of philosophical prose quoted from intellectuals identified only by initials (they include Jacques Derrida, Martin Buber and Julia Kristeva).

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

[16] In the early 1990s, he designed a Government-sponsored monument to the Egyptologist Jean Francois Champollion who deciphered the Rosetta Stone in Figeac; in Japan, he took on the curatorship of a show celebrating the Tokyo opening of Barneys New York; and in Frankfurt, Germany, and in Columbus, Ohio, he conceived neon monuments to the German cultural historian Walter Benjamin.

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

[17] After projects at public buildings such as the Deutsche Bundesbank (1997), the Parliament House, Stockholm (1998), and the Parliament of the Brussels-Capital Region (1999), Kosuth was commissioned to propose a work for the newly renovated Bundestag in 2001, he designed a floor installation with texts by Ricarda Huch and Thomas Mann for the Paul Löbe Haus [de].

[24] He culled objects from nearly every department of the museum, including religious paintings, many depictions of nudes, social satire and some erotica; among the selected works, therew were sculptures by Auguste Rodin of lesbians embracing, and furniture from the Bauhaus, the avant-garde German design school closed down by the Nazis.

[6] These were then juxtaposed with pithy and frequently moving observations from a number of writers in a way that emphasizes how perceptions of art are constantly changing.

The works' sometimes extensive labels were written by their curators, while the larger type statements emanated from various art historians, philosophers and social critics.

[25] 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.