Since the early 1970’s Paul Kos’s work has challenged conventions of art media and subject matter. For a global audience, he staged new possibilities for artistic treatments of time, space and cultural systems. Kos, one of the founders of the Bay Area conceptual movement, has exhibited internationally and has work represented in major museum collections including New York’s MoMA, the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, SFMoMA, and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

Paul Kos has engaged, over 30 years, the paradoxes in art and community, temporality and faith, by means of playfully diverse installations and objects.
—Jonathan Gilmore, Art Historian, Princeton University, April 2004

Kos was raised as an observant Catholic, but such religious allusions in his work seem less about organized ritual than the desire to challenge the principle of the disenchantment of art. In his most famous work, Chartres Bleu (1983–86), re-created in the exhibition (the original is at the di Rosa Preserve in Napa), Kos monitored the passage of time in shots of a 27-panel stained-glass window in the choir ambulatory of the cathedral at Chartres. Each of 27 monitors, which are stacked in the shape of the window, shows a time-lapse video, condensed into a 12-minute sequence, of a different glass panel photographed regularly over the course of 24 hours. Evolving from an extremely bright, nearly illegible array of colors, to clearly defined narrative scenes of the Life of Mary, to almost complete darkness, the work offers a reflection on modes of temporal experience and represents an attempt to reinvest a debased modern technology with a 13th-century medium's charge of the divine.