Jannis Kounellis

Jannis Kounellis was born in 1936 with the Pirée, in Greece. It is one of the artists of the EC what the critic Germano Concealing defined as the Arte Povera.

Biography and artistic course

At twenty years, it leaves the Greece and it goes to Rome to study with the Academy of Beautiful arts under the direction of Toti Scialoja to which it owes the influence of the abstract Expressionnisme and the Informal art which constitutes the fundamental binomial which constitutes the departure of its creative course.

In 1960, it makes its beginnings while preparing, with Rome, its first personal exposure to the gallery " Tartaruga".

Compared to its Masters, Kounellis quickly shows a very strong urgency of communication with the goal to refuse projections individualist, esthétisante and declining and of exalter the public, collective value of the artistic language. In its first works, indeed, it paints typographical signs on clear bottom which refer to the invention of a new order by a split up language, pulverized.

The first exposures close ideologically to the arte will povera go back to 1967. It employs in those of the products and materials of common employment suggesting for art a function radically creative, mythical, without concessions with the pure representations. It makes in an obvious way, reference to its Greek origins. Its installations become true scenography which occupy the gallery completely and surround the spectator while returning it Acteur, protagonist in a space which it goes even until filling of live animals, counterpoint to the geometries built with materials which evoke the industrial production. In the Margherita di fuoco" appears even fire, mythical element and symbolic system par excellence, generated however by a blowtorch.

In 1969 the installation becomes a true performance with the " Chevaux" attached to the walls of the gallery “Attico” of Fabio Sargentini, in a splendid ideal clash between Natural and Culture in which the role of the artist is at least reduced of a substantially manual operation, almost of tired man.

With the passage to the Années 1970 the voluntary enthusiasm of Kounellis takes care of a different heaviness, proportional to the disenchantment and frustration vis-a-vis the bankruptcy of the innovating potentialities of the Arte Povera, left in spite of him dynamic commercial the consumer society, traditional spaces of exposure like the museums and the galleries. Such an idea is expressed with the famous door closed with stones presented for the first time to San Benedetto del Tronto and during the years, with dense significant variations structural of significances poetic, with Rome, Mönchengladbach, Baden-Baden, London, Cologne.

In 1972, Kounellis takes part for the first time in the Biennale de Venise.

The years of bitterness continue with installations in which with the vitality of fire the obscure presence of soot succeeds while the live animals yield the step to empaillés animals. The top of this process is perhaps the imposing work presented to the Espai Poublenou of Barcelona in 1989, characterized by quarters of ox coldly shot down, fixed by means of hooks at metal plates and lit oil lamps. More recently, Kounellis work was made virtuoso and mannerist and took again topics and suggestions which had characterized it before with a méditatif spirit, able to interpret with a new conscience the primitive propensity with the monumental emphase. Examples of this new direction of research are the installation of 1995, piazza Plebiscito , with Naples, and in the exposures to the Mexico (1999), in Argentine (2000) and Uruguay (2001). In 2002, the artist proposes, again, the installation of the horses in Whitechapel of London and, a little later with the National Gallery of Modern art of Rome, it builds enormous a labyrinth of long sheets where rests, as as much point of hangs, the traditional elements of its art, like the " charbon" , the " coton" , jute bags and heaps of stones (" Act unique").

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