Jannis Kounellis:
Untitled 1977-1987
Silkscreen in B/W on white plywood cardboard with a postcard with 2 color bars assembled with a clip.
Cm 68x91
signed and numbered by hand by the artist on the front.
n. / 100 pieces
Artwork included in the folder "Contrappunti - 7 notazioni visive di Accardi, Boetti, Buren, Kounellis, LeWitt, Paolini e Pistoletto" published by A.E.I.O.U Edizioni d'arte (Rome).
Rare graphic work of very high quality and perfectly preserved in the protective folder.
Not framed.
Present certificate of authenticity and provenance (signature and embossed stamp of the publisher with photographic reference and numbering).
Pictured is a numbered/framed copy for illustrative purposes only.
The numbering of the sample delivered may be different depending on availability.
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BIOGRAPHY
Jannis Kounellis (Piraeus, Greece 1936 - Rome 2017) is a close-up exponent of what the critic Germano Celant has called "poor art".
Twenties, leaves Greece and moves to Rome to study at the Academy of Fine Arts under the guidance of Toti Scialoja to which the influence of the abstract expressionism that together with informal art constitutes the fundamental binomial from which he takes the moves His creative path.
He debuted in 1960, always setting up his first personal exhibition at the "La Tartaruga" gallery. Compared to its masters, Kounellis immediately shows a very strong communicative urgency that leads to the rejection of individualistic, aestheticizing and decadent prospects and the monitoring of the public value, collective of artistic language. In its first works, in fact, he paints typographic signs on a light background that allude to the invention of a new order for a crushed, pulverized language.
They date back to 1967 the first ideologically close exhibitions to the movement of poor art in which the use of common products and materials suggest for art a radically creative, mythical function without concessions to the mere representation. Evidents are also references to the rink of its origins. Its installations become real sets that physically occupy the gallery and surround the viewer making it actor protagonist in a space that also begins to fill up with live animals, opposed to the geometries built with materials that evoke industrial production. In the "fire daisy" also appears to fire, mythical and symbolic element par excellence, but generated by a torch cylinder.
In 1969 the installation becomes real performance with "horses" linked to the walls of the "L'Attico" gallery by Fabio Sargentini, in a sumptuous ideal confrontation between nature and culture in which the role of the artist is reduced to the minimum level of A substantially manual, almost from a fatigue man. With the passage to the 1970s the volivist enthusiasm of Kounellis is charged with a different heaviness, the fruit of disenchantment and frustration in the face of the failure of the innovative potential of poor art, swallowed in despite the commercial dynamics of the consumption society, sored by the Traditional fruition spaces like museums and galleries. This feeling is expressed by the famous door closed with stones presented for the first time in San Benedetto del Tronto and therefore over the years, with significant structural variations dense of poetic meanings, in Rome, Mönchengladbach, Baden-Baden, London, Cologne.
In 1972 Kounellis participates for the first time at the Venice Biennale.
The years of amazement continues with installations in which to the vitality of the fire takes over the dark presence of soot as the live animals give way to the embalmed ones. The culmination of this process is perhaps the grandiose work presented at the Poublenou Exhabs in Barcelona in 1989, characterized by quarters of freshly slaughtered ox fixed by metal slab hooks and illuminated by oil lanterns. In the most recent years the art of Kounellis was virtually managed and resumed themes and suggestions that had characterized him earlier with a more meditative spirit, capable of interpreting with a renewed awareness the primitive propensity to monumental emphasis. Examples of this new research direction are the installation of 1995 in Piazza Plebiscito, in Naples, and therefore the exhibitions in Mexico (1999), Argentina (2000) and Uruguay (2001). In 2002, the artist proposes the installation of the horses at the Whitechapel in London and, shortly afterwards, at the National Gallery of Modern Art of Rome builds a huge maze of sheet metal along which he poses, there were also as many landlines, the traditional elements of the His art, such as "carboniere", the "cototheriere", jute bags and piles of stones ("unique act"). In 2007 he works at the construction of the 383rd feast of Santa Rosalia in Palermo drawing the triumphal wagon of the Holy. In 2019 Germano Celanta cured the first retrospective exhibition dedicated to Kounellis at the Prada foundation in Venice.
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