Jannis Kounellis – The Greek Kounellis became an artist in Italy
Jannis Kounellis was born in Piraeus on 23 March 1936. He experienced the Second World War of his childhood through his father, a ship engineer, who was a member of the resistance, and the Greek Civil War, before emigrating to Italy with his wife in 1956. Although he had already attended the Athens School of Fine Arts in his native Greece, it was first in Italy that Kounellis received his decisive influence, and he himself once said that he was Greek as a person but Italian as an artist. Kounellis studied at the Accademia di Belle Arte and began his creative career as a painter. In his debut, L'alfabeto di Kounellis, the name was the agenda: The Alphabet of Kounellis consisted of numerous letters, numbers and symbols that the artist arranged on white canvases. From 1960 to 1966, paintings dominated the artist's oeuvre, although Jannis Kounellis also incorporated sculptural elements into his work early on. While he initially only reflected objects such as street signs in his paintings, he later made real street signs part of his works.
Living animals, dead flesh, revolutionary art
Jannis Kounellis moved ever further away from his more conventional beginnings as a painter and increasingly turned to object art. He was particularly inspired by international artists such as the American painters Franz Kline and Jackson Pollock and the Dutch avant-garde artist Piet Mondrian, and also owed important ideas to the work of Kazimir Malevich. With his innovative ideas, Kounellis broke existing rules, challenged his audience, and was quickly perceived as a revolutionary. Following exhibitions with live birds and horses, the artist also caused a sensation with installations made from pieces of bloody meat from the slaughterhouse. His international breakthrough came in 1973 with his first participation in the Venice Biennale, and the following year took part in the second ADA actions of the avant-garde in Berlin - alongside prominent artists such as Wolf Kahlen, Edward Kienholz, Wolf Vostell, Daniel Buren, Jochen Gerz and Rafael Canogar. Kounellis was very well received in Germany and was offered a teaching position at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, which he held from 1993 to 2001.
The hidden wealth in poor art
Today, Jannis Kounellis is primarily associated with Arte Povera, of which he was one of the founders. As a pioneer of this influential movement, he drew artistic wealth from ‘poor’ materials, turning clothes racks, furniture, cabbage, fire, soot, steel and stone into components of admired art objects. Encouraged by the example of Joseph Beuys, with whom Kounellis was also friends, the dimensions grew into expansive installations and stagings and he consequently also worked as a celebrated stage designer and playwright. His installation of a gallows decorated with furniture next to the cathedral in Schwäbisch-Gmünd also developed into a drama: the outraged population protested, the local press reported on it for several weeks, and the installation finally had to be dismantled prematurely - not because of the protests, however, but due to irreparable damage caused by spring storms. With his approach of reutilising old objects for works of art, Kounellis anticipated the increasingly important idea of recycling and interpreted it in his own way. If necessary, the artist also made personal sacrifices: in 2011, he unceremoniously added the pair of shoes he was wearing to an installation in Kleve and then had to buy a new pair.
Jannis Kounellis died in Rome on 16 February 2017.
Jannis Kounellis - Works that have already been sold at Kunsthaus Lempertz:
