Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Conceptual art, video, installation, sculpture, performance
Website: paulkos.net
Paul Kos was born on December 23, 1942, in Rock Springs, Wyoming, the son of a small-town doctor, and moved to San Francisco in the early 1960s. He received his BFA (1965) and MFA (1967) from the San Francisco Art Institute, where he subsequently taught for thirty years (1978–2008) and was instrumental in developing the New Genres Department. He lives and works in San Francisco and in the Sierra Nevada mountains. He is represented by Anglim/Trimble Gallery in San Francisco and Galerie Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois in Paris. His work is in the permanent collections of MoMA, SFMOMA, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Wallraf-Richartz Museum Cologne, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, the Auckland Art Gallery, the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, and many others.
His awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship in video and audio (1990), six NEA fellowships, a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Fellowship (1985), a Flintridge Foundation Fellowship (1999), a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, and the Dodd Chair at the University of Georgia. In 1973 his video works were part of Leo Castelli Gallery’s nascent video program and included in the São Paulo Biennial.
Kos is one of the founders of the Bay Area Conceptual Art movement, helping to define a West Coast approach to conceptualism that privileged practical material reality, play, and an engagement with the natural world over purely cerebral abstraction. His core statement — “materials can be both form and content” — captures a practice in which humble objects are chosen for their intrinsic physical and associative properties: ice melting in a steel pan, pétanque balls balanced on a wooden beam, a broom standing at an impossible angle, twelve video monitors stacked in the arch-shape of a Chartres Cathedral stained glass window. Buddhist culture, the religious dimension of ordinary experience, games (pétanque, chess, pool), and the political landscape have all been persistent subjects. He was among the first artists in Northern California to create performance-based film and video works and participatory installations, and has continued to move fluidly between media throughout his career.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
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