Joseph Kosuth
In the late 1960s, Joseph Kosuth began challenging the very necessity of a work’s materiality. Language is at the core of Kosuth’s work; it is both a plastic tool and his field of investigation.
Among his early pieces, One and Three Chairs (1965), simultaneously depicts a chair, a photograph of a chair, and its dictionary definition, establishing equivalency between the object, the image of the object, and the concept of the object. Self-Defined in Five Colors (1966) is one of the best examples of his approach.
