Jannis Kounellis(b.Piraeus,Greece,1936; d.Rome,Italy,2017) was a pioneer of post- war European art and a leading figure of the Italian movement Arte Povera. Although he always considered himself a painter, early in his career Kounellis moved beyond the medium’s constraints, and his interdisciplinary practice has since come to embody the spirit of material and conceptual freedom championed by Arte Povera artists. After a childhood spent in Greece, Kounellis moved to Italy in 1956 to study at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome. Shortly after, he had his first solo show, titled L’alfabeto di Kounellis, at the Galleria la Tartaruga, Rome, in 1960. Influenced by artists of the post-war Roman scene like Alberto Burri, whose work provided an alternative to the expressive pictorial language of Art Informel, Kounellis sought to redefine the boundaries of painting, eschewing representation in order to capture the sensual and experiential aspects of real life. By 1963 he was incorporating found objects, fragments of industrial materials and sensory elements into his canvases. Later in the decade his work grew increasingly performative, characterised by interaction and ephemerality, two principles which proved foundational to the development of Arte Povera. Across six decades of work, Kounellis’ wide-ranging practice remained absolutely sui generis, offering a unique fusion of painting, sculpture, drama and installation where history, nature and artifice combine in poetic and revelatory ways. Using diverse materials ranging from soil, stones, sacks and fire to coal, steel beams and doorways, Kounellis’ ground-breaking work continuously defied established methods of making and exhibiting art, and remains highly influential to this day.
In 1967, Kounellis was included in the seminal group exhibition Arte povera e IM spazio at the Galleria La Bertesca, Genoa. Kounellis had his first solo show in New York in 1972 at the Sonnabend Gallery, and the same year made his debut at the Venice Biennale. In the following years his work featured in many international exhibitions, including at the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Obra Social, Caja de Pensiones, Madrid; the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London; and the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden. In 1986, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, staged a retrospective of Kounellis’s work; the show traveled to the Musée d’Art Contemporain, Montreal. In 1994, Kounellis installed a selection of more than thirty years of his work in a boat called Ionion and docked this floating retrospective in his home port of Piraeus. The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía held an exhibition of Kounellis’s work in Madrid in 1997. Kounellis received major exhibitions at Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome (2002), Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Donnaregina in Naples (2006), and Neue National Galerie in Berlin (2008). Recent important museum retrospectives include Today Art Museum in Beijing (2011), Musée D’Art Moderne in Saint- Etienne (2014), Fondazione Prada in Venice (2019), and Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (2022-23).
His works are held in major public collections, such as Kunstmuseum Bonn; K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf; MoMA – Museum of Modern Art and Solomon R. Guggemheim Museum, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and the Tate, London among many others.
