Paul Kos

Paul Kos (American, b. December 23, 1942) is a conceptual artist and one of the founders of the Bay Area Conceptual Art movement in California. In the late 1960s and 70s, this area was already known for cultural change and political activism. It was a natural consequence that revolutionary art and ideas would develop right there. The Bay Area was a motherland of new forms of video, performance and installation art. Paul Kos (together with his contemporaries Vito Acconci, Howard Fried, and Bruce Nauman) was one of the first artists to incorporate video, sound and interactivity into his sculptural installations. Kos is drawn to the integrity of materials, and in finding a place where material, play, chance and meaning can magically come together. For Kos, manipulation and participation are fundamental to art.

Paul Kos moved from Wyoming to San Francisco where he received both his B.F.A and M.F.A from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1967, where he later taught in the New Genres department. When he moved, cultural curiosity, exploration and political activism had already set the ground basis for future artistic practice. Kos was interested in finding the best means of expressing contemporary ideas about the culture in which he lived and therefore abandoned traditional artistic media such as painting, drawing, and sculpting. Over the years, his interest in video and sculptural installations has grown. His art was influenced by Earth Art and Arte Povera and that influence shows in his pieces The Sound of Ice Melting (1970) and Sand Piece (1971). In the mid-1960s he worked on abstract fiberglass sculptures, but he then turned away from those to more site-specific art that was meaningful both through the process and because of the final product. The first major retrospective of his work “Everything Matters” was held at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. A second major survey of the artist's work was held at di Rosa in 2016. Today Kos lives and works in San Francisco. He has exhibited widely on both the West and East coasts and has received numerous prestigious awards, including five National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and the Rockefeller Foundation fellowship. His work can be found in the collections of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, di Rosa, the Museum of Modern Art (New York), and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

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