Jannis Kounellis was born in Piraeus, Greece, in 1936. The son of a Greek naval engineer, Kounellis shone most brightly outside his home country. Aged just 20, after a brief period at the Athens School of Fine Arts, he travelled to Rome to study at the National Academy of San Luca under Toti Scialoja, to whom he owes his knowledge and stylistic affiliation with expressionism and abstract informalism – the two fundamental pillars of his career.
As early as 1960, his first solo exhibition took place at Galleria La Tartaruga in Rome. Already, a discernible shift was taking place between what the artist had been taught and what he would eventually embrace. An urgency of communication and collective feeling emerged through typographic signs against clear backgrounds.
This communal resolve perhaps explains why Kounellis gradually chose to adopt – and be embraced by – Arte Povera around 1967. So much so that he was invited by Germano Celant to the movement’s opening show at Galleria La Bertesca in Genoa in 1967. Kounellis’ prodigious use of mineral materials, implying a quasi-spiritual relationship with nature, harked back to his Hellenistic background and upbringing. From show to show, his installations became dense and replete with artworks, geometrical shapes, materials and even live animals – often horses. Seeking to make the viewer the protagonist of a living and breathing space, Kounellis ventured into performance.
This enthusiasm was short-lived, however. The limits to the innovative potential of Arte Povera were bitterly apparent in the 1970s, as large immovable stones and closed doors took on symbolic roles. Obscurity would become an increasingly important feature of his installations. Live creatures made way for dead, stuffed animals, or merely butchered fragments, none more so than in Barcelona in 1989, where he displayed freshly slaughtered cow on the gallery walls.
Entangled in his own frustrations and nihilistic disillusion, Kounellis continued to invite the viewer into labyrinthine, inhabited spaces – optimism making rare but poetic resurgences in his work.
Notable recent exhibitions include those at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Saint-Étienne and Galerie Lelong, Paris (2014); Museum Kurhaus, Kleve, Germany (2012); Klein – Kounellis – Feu / contre-feu, Galerie Lelong, Paris (2011); the Marcelino Botín Foundation, Spain (2010); HEART, Herning Museum of Contemporary Art, Denmark (2009); Domaine de Chaumont-sur-Loire (2009); Matadero Madrid (2009); the Arnaldo Pomodoro Foundation, Milan (2007); Hôtel des Arts, Toulon (2005); the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens (2003); Ars Aevi Forum, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina (2003); and Palais de l’Unesco, Paris (2002).
Kounellis passed away in 2017.
