ART CITIES:London-Amnesia by Joseph Kosuth

Featuring works that dates from 1965 through to 2011, ‘Amnesia: Various, Luminous, Fixed.’ offers an extensive overview of Joseph Kosuth’s oeuvre in neon. The exhibition will feature 25 neon works at the Sprüth Magers Gallery the artist chronicles an almost 50-year investigation…

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Sprüth Magers Gallery Archive

The role of language and meaning in art, as well as Kosuth’s enduring use of neon, which he first developed as a medium in the 1960s (preceding Bruce Nauman, Mario Merz and Keith Sonnier, for example), when Kosuth considered the medium a form of “public writing”, without fine art associations. these art works which as we all know are probably the best not only of his career, but also the most representative examples of conceptual art. His solo exhibition “Amnesia: Various, Luminous, Fixed” is the continuation of the exhibition “Insomnia: Assorted, Illuminated, Fixed” at Sprüth Magers, Berlin in 2013.The exhibition will feature 25 of Kosuth’s neon works, including one of the artist’s first neons Five Fives (to Donald udd) [orange] (1965), alongside recent works such as three from his Beckett series 2011. As an important pioneer of conceptual art, Kosuth initiated appropriation strategies, language-based works and the use of photography in the 1960s. The artist characteristically develops his investigations into language and perception through the use of series, a format that opens up space for play and reflexivity in multiple directions. In the celebrated Freud series 1981-1989, Kosuth re-positions and reflects on the meanings employed in psychoanalyst’s texts with pieces and installations. Fetishism (Corrected) 1988 for instance, consists of an enlarged reproduction, complete with corrections by Freud’s hand, of the opening page proof of the essay ‘Fetischismus’. Kosuth extricates the corrections, converting them into cobalt blue neon and mounting them together on the wall around the framed proof, highlighting how writing is studied and converted into artefacts, and from artefacts to art. Three works from the recent Beckett series 2011 will also be exhibited. Fabricated in warm white neon with the facing side dipped in black paint, Kosuth uses fragments from two of Beckett’s works: the renowned “Waiting for Godot” and the lesser-known “Texts for Nothing”. The playwright and artist share an interest in how language can conceal and reveal meaning in the act of constructing new meaning; while Beckett approaches the question of meaning by investigating its absence, or the impossibility of meaning revealing itself through language, Kosuth asserts its presence by posing questions about how meaning is produced, by both artist and viewer.

Info: ‘’Amnesia: Various, Luminous, Fixed.’’, Joseph Kosuth, Sprüth Magers Gallery, 7A Grafton St, London, δθρατιον: 26/1/14-14/2/15, Days & Hours: Tue- Sat: 10:00- 18:00, www.spruethmagers.com/home