Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) trained as a sculptor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where he later became a professor — a position he held until his controversial dismissal in 1972 after he challenged the academy's restrictive admissions policy. That conflict between institutional control and open participation was not incidental to his practice; it was central to it.

By the early 1960s Beuys had moved performance — which he called "actions" — to the centre of his work. In How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965), his head covered in honey and gold leaf, he murmured explanations to a dead animal while viewers watched from outside the gallery: a staged demonstration of communication's limits. In I Like America and America Likes Me (1974) he spent several days in a New York gallery with a live coyote, entering and leaving the United States wrapped in felt without ever touching the city directly. These were not spectacles but ritualised encounters, structured around duration, material, and symbolic tension.

That thinking culminated in his concept of "social sculpture" — the proposition that society itself could be shaped as a creative process, with education, ecology, and civic life as legitimate artistic media. Working at the outer edge of conceptual art, Beuys shared its central premise — that an idea could constitute the work — while pushing it further than most of his conceptual contemporaries: not just questioning what art could be, but what society itself could become. His statement that "everyone is an artist" reflected this conviction precisely: not a dismissal of skill, but an assertion that creative capacity is distributed rather than owned by specialists.

Beuys died in 1986, but his most visible legacy continues to grow: 7000 Oaks, initiated at documenta 7 in 1982, is still expanding, decades after the last tree was planted.

7000 Oaks – City Forestation Instead of City Administration (1982) is Beuys's most enduring intervention. Launched at documenta 7 in Kassel, the project proposed planting 7,000 oak trees across the city, each paired with a basalt column removed only once its tree was planted. Unlike conventional public sculpture, the artwork unfolds over years — growth, negotiation, and civic participation built into its structure. Decades later, the trees remain: living proof that a sculpture can be an ongoing process rather than a finished object.

How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965) remains his most cited action. For several hours, Beuys carried a dead hare through a gallery, his face gilded in honey and gold leaf, murmuring explanations to it while the audience watched from outside, unable to enter. The work staged the fragility of understanding itself — a demonstration that explanation, however sincere, cannot guarantee comprehension.

I Like America and America Likes Me (1974) placed Beuys in a New York gallery for several days with a live coyote, having entered the country wrapped in felt without setting foot on American soil directly. Invoking frontier mythology and Indigenous history, the work reframed performance as negotiation between species, cultures, and unresolved histories — a tension the piece never fully resolves.

Schlitten (1969) distils his material philosophy into its most literal form: a wooden sled equipped with felt, a torch, and a lump of fat — what Beuys called his "survival materials," referencing the rescue myth at the centre of his own biography. Produced as a standalone edition of 50, unsigned but numbered, it was sold at the time for a deliberately modest price: art conceived as emergency equipment, available to a broad public rather than reserved for collectors alone.

Beuys treated the multiple not as a secondary product but as a deliberate philosophical instrument. "If you have all my multiples," he said, "then you have me entirely" — positioning editions not as souvenirs of his practice, but as its most complete embodiment. Between 1965 and his death in 1986, he produced several hundred fine art multiples, incorporating materials as varied as felt, fat, copper, printed diagrams, and found objects.

Few works state this logic more purely than Intuition (1968): a plain wooden box marked with two lines — the upper one bounded at both ends, standing for the closed limits of rational thought; the lower one breaking open to the right, standing for intuition extending beyond reason. The box itself holds nothing. It functions as a vessel for the viewer's own thinking, incomplete without that participation. Produced in an edition of 12,000 and originally sold for just 8 Deutschmarks through Wolfgang Feelisch's mail-order distribution, it embodied Beuys's ambition to break open an elitist art market — a genuine artwork anyone could afford.

Felt Suit (1970) and Capri Batterie (1985) distil the same logic in material form. The Felt Suit — a plain grey suit made entirely of felt, hung as if worn — translates his central material into a wearable form, protection and vulnerability made literal. Capri Batterie, a yellow lightbulb wired to a lemon, condenses an entire ecological argument — sustainable, absurd, and precise — into an object small enough to hold in one hand. None of the three functions as a copy of some more important, singular original; each is a complete philosophical proposition in portable form.

This was not reproducibility for commercial convenience. If social sculpture depends on distributed participation, the artwork itself must resist confinement to a single object or institution — the multiple was the necessary form for ideas built to circulate. For collectors, Beuys's prints and multiples offer direct access to the philosophical core of his practice. Artworks are held in the permanent collections of Tate, the Centre Pompidou, the Guggenheim, and the Museo Reina Sofía.