OCMA | Orange County Museum of Art

Paul Kos is a pioneering West Coast conceptual artist who was born in Rock Springs, WY, and received a BFA (1965) and an MFA (1967), both in painting, from the San Francisco Art Institute. From the late 1960s to the 1970s, Kos experimented with performance, new media, and installation, emphasizing ideas over form and employing a minimal aesthetic, and in so doing helped define a West Coast approach to form that privileged the use of materials to examine perception, social relations, and daily life. Like many Bay Area artists, Kos was influenced by the tide of interest in Buddhist culture prevalent within Northern California. An important characteristic of Kos?s work is a sense of play, meaning that his art can either be either organized around ideas that come from games pool, or chess; or the work itself can be engaging and playful.