Jannis Kounellis (1936-2017) is a leading figure associated with Arte Povera from 1967 onwards, his work is characterised by the juxtaposition of elements, including ready-made objects such as bed frames, doors and shelves and raw materials such as stone, cotton, wool, coal, fire and soot. Occasionally, he has used live animals in his work, most famously inUntitled/Twelve Horses(1969), shown at Galleria L’Attico, Rome, where horses were tethered inside the gallery space. Influenced by a broad range of artists, from Kazemir Malevich, Alberto Burri, Lucio Fontana to Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline, Kounellis has extended the boundaries of contemporary art, and in particular the possibilities of painting, making works that reflect the ever changing world around us while also deeply resonating with his own traditions and culture.

Kounellis works are included in the collections of the most important international institutions such as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Kunsthalle Hamburg, the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome, the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin and the Museum of Contemporary Art Donnaregina in Naples.

Jannis Kounellis was born in Piraeus, Athens, in 1936. In 1956 he moved to Rome where he enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts and studied under Toti Scialoja, one of the most important Italian artists of the last century. Jannis Kounellis has repeatedly described himself as a Greek person, but self-identified as an Italian artist, who immersed himself immediately in the cultural heritage of Italy. The Roman gallery La Tartaruga, founded by Plinio De Martiis in 1956, gave him his first exhibition in 1960, while he was still a student. As a participant in the famous Arte Povera group exhibition organized by Germano Celant in Genoa in 1967, Jannis Kounellis was quickly considered one of the major representatives of this artistic movement. Arte Povera was the most significant and influential avant-garde movement to emerge in Europe in the 1960s. Believing that modernity threatened to erase our sense of memory along with all signs of the past, the Arte Povera group sought to contrast the new and the old in order to complicate our sense of the effects of passing time. They proposed an idea of art that was much more interested in materiality and physicality, and borrowed forms and materials from everyday life, making art without the restraints of traditional practices and materials. Leading artists included Giovanni Anselmo, Alighiero Boetti, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Luciano Fabro, Piero Gilardi, Jannis Kounellis, Mario Merz, Marisa Merz, Giulio Paolini, Pino Pascali, Giuseppe Penone, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Emilio Prini and Gilberto Zorio.

The year 1969 marked a turning point in his work with the exhibition at the gallery Attico, where horses were attached to the walls of an exhibition room, and where apart from the animals, their neighing, sounds and smells were also present. From this moment he abandoned the practice of paint to navigate through the infinite and relative dimensions of space, material and time. ‘There is no style,’he later asserted. ‘What we must try to achieve today is the unity between art and life.’ In several untitled works reflecting his new approach, Mr. Kounellis placed burlap sacks on a wood and steel dolly and attached tufts of raw wool to wooden frames and poles.

Kounellis’s repertoire of materials included canvases, rock, wood, burlap, wool, steel, lead, gold, fire, and fragments of classical sculpture, which he has since employed in numerous combinations to formulate a body of work that is iconographically consistent yet stylistically variable. The metal wall reliefs, are morphologically reminiscent of painting but conceptually distant. Such a juxtaposition of contradictory materials serves perhaps as an allegory for human fragility and the inevitability of historical imperatives. In his best works, the ideas of past, present, and future are unified. His works were exhibited for the first time at the Venice Biennale and Documenta in Kassel in 1972, the same year as his first exhibition in the United States, at the Ileana Sonnabend Gallery in New York.