Jannis Kounellis : Installation (Galeria Nieves Fernandez)

Kounellis considers himself to be “a Greek person but an Italian artist”. Born in Greece, he moved to Italy in 1956 and studied at the ‘Academia di Belle Arti’ in Rome. Following a two year hiatus from painting, in 1967 he surfaced as an influential contributor to the newly emerging ‘Arte Povera’ movement. From this point his art developed as a mixture of painting, sculpture, collage and installation. It is characterised by the unusual combination of physically and culturally opposing materials. This includes soil, stones, sacks, fire, live animals, bed frames and doorways. Through his ambitious works Kounellis challenges the traditional notions of both painting and the gallery space. [Ex]

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Installation
Jannis Kounellis
Galeria Nieves Fernandez
February 2006
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He began creating large installations using natural elements or objects from everyday life such as real people and live animals, stones, cacti, instant coffee, carding-wool, jute sacks, empty or filled with corn, darting oxy-hydrogen flames, fragments of copies of classical sculptures, paraffin lamps, iron consoles and railway tracks. The reading of the whole that is created is neither literal nor narrative, but instead indicates simultaneously the concretization of an idea and the consequent construction of an image that intervenes in the fracture between history and representation, between totality and fragment.

[Extract : Museo Madre of Naples]

Jannis Kounellis : Gorka Lejarcegi

Jannis Kounellis : Museo Madre of Naples

Jannis Kounellis : Galeria Nieves Fernandez