Everything Matters: Paul Kos, A Retrospective

Born in 1942, Paul Kos has been a highly influential artist in the Bay Area for well over three decades. In the late 1960s and early 1970s he was one of the major figures on the early Conceptual art scene, notable especially for his early experimental video works and seemingly simple but technically innovative sculptural installations, which generally featured evocative audio or video components. He was one of the first to incorporate video into interactive installations. The artist's best-known work is arguably the sublime “Chartres Bleu,” a 1986 video installation that re-creates in full scale a stained-glass window from the Chartres cathedral in France. Each of the 27 vertically stacked video monitors duplicates an individual leaded glass panel. The brightness of the images stimulates the light changes in a normal day, accelerated to 12 minutes. Depending on the light, the narrative scenes are clearly readable or, when brightly illuminated, dissolved into abstractness. Everything Matters, published on the occasion of an exhibition of Kos's work at the Berkeley Art Museum, is the first major volume on his work.