BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES:
JOSEPH KOSUTH
Biography
Joseph Kosuth is one of the pioneers of conceptual art and installations, starting in the 1960’s with works based on the language and strategies of appropriation. His work has consistently explored the production and role of the inherent meaning of art. His almost thirty years of study of the relationship between language and art is manifested through installations, museum exhibitions, public commissions, and publications in Europe, the Americas, and Asia. Kosuth has participated at five Kassel Documenta and four Venice Biennale exhibitions, while also exhibiting at the Hungarian pavilion in 1993. He has received various awards, including the Brandeis Award, 1990, the Frederick Weisman Award, 1991, and the Honorable Mention at the Venice Biennale in 1993. In 1993 he was inducted by the French Government as Chevalier de l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He has received various fellowships and grants, including the Cassandra Foundation Grant. In June 1999, the French Government printed a 3 franc stamp to commemorate his work at Figeac. In February 2001 the University of Bologna awarded him an Honorary Degree in Letters and Philosophy. His novel Purloined was published in 2001 by Salon Verlag. In October 2003 he received the Knight’s Cross First Class of the Republic of Austria.
He was born in Toledo, Ohio on January 31, 1945. He studied at the Cleveland Institute of Art, 1963-64; The School of Visual Arts a New York City, 1965-1967; the New School for Social Research (anthropology and philosophy), 1971-1972. He taught at the Department of Fine Art, The School of Visual Arts di New York City, 1967-1985; he was Professor at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg, 1988-1990, and at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Stuttgart, 1991-1997. He currently teaches at the Kunstakademie in Munich and the IUAV in Venice. He has been visiting professor at various universities and institutions for almost thirty years, including: Yale University, Cornell University, New York University, Duke University, UCLA, Cal Arts, Cooper Union, the Pratt Institute, The Museum of Modern Art di New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Royal Academy of Copenhagen, the Ashmoleon Museum, Oxford University, the University of Rome, the Kunstakademie of Berlin, the Royal College of Art in London, the Glasgow School of Art, The Hayward Gallery in London, the Sorbonne in Paris, and the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna.
He lives and works in New York and Rome.
JANNIS KOUNELLIS
Biography
Jannis Kounellis was born in Piraeus, Greece in 1936.
He moved to Rome in 1956, where he enrolled at the Accademia di Belle Arti. He held his first personal show at the Galleria La Tartaruga in Rome, while still a student in 1960, exhibiting paintings with letters, numbers, arrows, and other symbols painted in black tempera on white canvas.
Influenced by Alberto Burri and Lucio Fontana, whose works offered an alternative to the expressionism of Art Informel, Kounellis tried to “push” painting towards new territory. His painting style gradually became sculptural, and in 1963 he started to use natural elements and materials – both inert and organic – like wood, wax, lead, flowers, jute sacks, grain, coffee beans, coal, etc. Among the various materials that he started using at the end of the 1960’s are fire, soil, and gold, occasionally alluding to his interest in alchemy. In his reflection on the relationship between art and nature, he also used live animals as an expression of vital energy, thus adding the dimension of performance to his art installations.
Starting in the 1970’s and continuing into the 1980’s, Kounellis further enriched his formal vocabulary with elements infused with anthropological and mythological suggestions, thereby expanding his repertoire of materials, introducing smoke, shelving, fragments of casts, stones, oxy-hydrogen flame, traces of soot, rags, wood and steel crossties, neon, plastic, industrial materials and fragments.
In 1967 Kounellis was invited to participate in an important group show entitled “Arte povera e IM spazio” at the Galleria La Bertesca in Genoa, when the term Arte Povera was coined by its first and foremost theoretician, Germano Celant.
Kounellis held his first personal show in New York at the Sonnabend Gallery in 1972.
From the 1970’s to today, numerous exhibitions have featured Kounellis, such as those held at the Musée d’Art Contemporain of Bordeaux (1985) and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago (1986), with a retrospective that was also held at the Musée d’Art Contemporain of Montreal. In 1989 he was featured in the exhibition held at Espai Pobenou in Barcelona. Several important retrospectives were also held in the 1990’s, such as the grand “floating” retrospective held in 1994 on the Ionion, which was moored at the port of Piraeus, where Kounellis collected and presented a selection from over 30 years of activity; the 1997 retrospective presented at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, and the exhibition held at the Centro d’Arte Contemporanea Pecci of Prato in 2001.
Jannis Kounellis currently lives in Rome.
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