Joseph Kosuth
The-exchange-value-of-language-has-fallen-to-zero
Berggruen Arts & Culture, Casa dei Tre Oci, Venice
Through November 22, 2026

Berggruen Arts & Culture and the Berggruen Institute Europe present a new exhibition by Joseph Kosuth, a pioneer of American conceptual art. With The-exchange-value-of-language-has-fallen-to-zero, curated by Mario Codognato and Adriana Rispoli, the artist invites viewers to reflect on the role of language in art and everyday life, demonstrating how meaning, context, and perception are inseparable.

Kosuth has a long-standing connection with the city of Venice. He has participated in eight editions of the Venice Biennale and created permanent installations such as The Material of Ornament at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia and To Invent Relations (For Carlo Scarpa) in the Aula Magna Mario Baratto at Ca’ Foscari University. Between 2021 and 2025, he also lived and worked in Venice. This exhibition brings together historical works and a new installation conceived for the main entrance of the exhibition space.

Joseph Kosuth
‘The Question’
January 24–March 15, 2025
London

Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers are proud to present a landmark exhibition at the London gallery in honour of Joseph Kosuth’s eightieth birthday. Spanning from his pioneering works of the 1960s to his most recent pieces, the show traces a profound continuity within Kosuth’s oeuvre, revealing a lifelong exploration of the fundamental questions of art. This exhibition highlights Kosuth’s enduring impact on contemporary thought, probing the intersections of perception, memory, and meaning. His works transcend mere artistic practice, creating spaces for critical engagement in a world increasingly numbed by oversimplification. Here, visitors are invited to reconsider the complex interplay between art, language, and society – a timely reflection on the misinformation and visual theatricality of our age.

Joseph Kosuth
Amnesia: various, luminous, fixed.
November 26, 2014–February 14, 2015
London

Featuring work that dates from 1965 through to 2011, 'Amnesia: Various, Luminous, Fixed.' offers an extensive overview of Joseph Kosuth’s oeuvre in neon. The show chronicles an almost 50-year investigation into 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. The exhibition will feature 25 of Kosuth’s neon works, including one of the artist’s first neons Five Fives (to Donald Judd) [orange] (1965), alongside recent works such as three from his Beckett series (2011).

Joseph Kosuth
Insomnia: assorted, illuminated, fixed.
April 27–August 31, 2013
Berlin

Featuring work dating from 1965 through to today, 'Insomnia: assorted, illuminated, fixed.' will for the first time offer an extensive overview of the artist’s work in neon. This chronicals a nearly 50 year-long investigation of the production and role of language and meaning within art, and an on-going use of neon, a material appropriated in the 1960’s first by Kosuth who considered it a form of ‘public writing’, without fine art associations, and traditionally associated with popular culture.

Joseph Kosuth
The Mind’s Image of Itself #3’ a play of architecture and the mind
September 10–October 1, 2011
London

'The Mind’s Image of Itself' is both a reflection on the architecture of the gallery space and of a suggested architecture of the mind. The installation is composed of an off register, a 1:1 wallpapered line drawing facsimile of the gallery rooms themselves; an architectural plan of the exhibition space visible only due to its off-centre positioning. Kosuth re-frames a structure that literally replicates and shifts the existing morphology of the once Georgian and Victorian architecture of the London gallery. The mind’s ‘image of itself’ is a reflection within itself, an allegorical re-tracing of the defining elements that make up both the physical context of the exhibition itself (its walls, doors and windows) while simultaneously presenting the various meanings that the space, as an architectural object and a social/culture interface in play, reflects.

Joseph Kosuth
February 8–April 13, 2006
London

Mondi Possibili
Thea Djordjadze, Peter Fischli David Weiss, Claus Föttinger, Thomas Grünfeld, Jenny Holzer, Stefan Kern, Joseph Kosuth, Louise Lawler, Michail Pirgelis, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Thomas Scheibitz, Andreas Schulze, Cindy Sherman, Rosemarie Trockel, Franz West
January 17–April 7, 2006
Cologne

As part of the PASSAGEN, the supporting programme of the International Furniture Fair in Cologne, at the beginning of the year Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers present a new edition of the exhibition “Mondi Possibili”. The works on display deal with the subject of furniture from a variety of angles: as citation, as homage, as adaptation, or as copy. Others are usable objects that hardly differ from their reference objects in the domain of design or furniture.

scripta manent – verba volant
Giovanni Anselmo, Joseph Beuys, Alighiero Boetti, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Jenny Holzer, Joseph Kosuth, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Richard Prince, Rosemarie Trockel
February 24–April 22, 1989
Cologne