ART-TRIBUTE:Jannis Kounellis

Jannis Kounellis made a highly distinctive contribution to one of the most provocative art movements in postwar Europe. As a pioneer of Arte Povera in the late 1960s, he created spectacular sculptures out of “poor”, mundane objects, arranged in startling juxtapositions on gallery walls or piled unceremoniously on the floor. In this way the materials’ different physical qualities and functional associations were emphasised to strengthen their viewers’ perception of everyday reality.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Fondazione Prada Archive

Developed in collaboration with Archivio Kounellis, the major retrospective “Jannis Kounellis”  brings together 70 works from 1958 to 2016 at the historic palazzo of Ca’ Corner della Regina in Venice. As a student in Rome, Jannis Kounellis’ appreciation of his cultural roots did not isolate him from more contemporary influences. While attending the city’s Accademia di Belle Arti in the late 1950s, he was profoundly affected by the most avant-garde Italian art, ranging from Alberto Burri’s stitched scraps of sacking to Piero Manzoni’s “achromes”. The blankness of Manzoni’s work was partly a reaction to the expressive qualities of art informel, the free abstract style that dominated the European avant-garde at this time. The artist’s early works, originally exhibited between 1960 and 1966, are presented in two spaces on the first floor of the Venetian palazzo and deal with urban language. In an early phase, these paintings reproduce actual writings and signs from the streets of Rome. Later on, the artist transferred black letters, arrows and numbers onto white canvases, paper or other surfaces, in a language deconstruction that expresses a fragmentation of the real. In 1967 Kounellis’ investigation turned more radical with the aim of overcoming the traditionally pictorial uniformity of his early production, embracing concrete and natural elements including birds, soil, cacti, wool, coal, cotton, and fire. In the installation “Untitled (Tragedia civile)” (1975), the contrast between the gold leaf that completely covers a bare wall and the black clothing hanging on a coat hanger underlines the dramatic nature of a scene that alludes to a personal and historical crisis. It is a self-portrait of the artist, here sacrificed and therefore absent, expressing the suffering of an existential and creative condition. A division between past and present that still retains some hope of coming back together again, as the presence of the lit acetylene lamp suggests. The two works from 1980 and 2006, composed of musical instruments connected to gas cylinders and wrought iron bells, are ideally connected to two works dated 1971. In the first case, several flutists play a fragment of Johann Sebastian Bach’s St Matthew Passion, while in the second an oil painting portrays the notes of another sacred composition by Bach, this time played live by a violoncellist. These works substitute or connect the image with sound, overcoming the traditional distinctions between artistic languages. The repetition of musical fragments and the physical presence of musicians allow the artist to explore once again the corporeal dimension of the work, as well as the sharing of a conceptual and sensorial experience between the author and the viewer. The door, displayed in this exhibition in three different declinations dating from 1974 to 2004, is another symbol of the artist’s intolerance for the dynamics of his present. The passageways between rooms are closed up with stones, wood, sewing machines and iron reinforcing bars, revealing the historical interiority of the building and making several spaces inaccessible in order to emphasize their unknown, metaphysical and surreal dimension. Over the years Kounellis would present the door motif in various versions, sometimes accompanied by bells and plaster casts of classical statues, the stratified memory of a visual and sensorial legacy at once profound and impenetrable. The exhibition narrative is completed with large-scale installations realized by Kounellis from the end of the 1980s. These ensembles, which multiplied the modularity of historical works in order to inhabit the space, envelop shelves or metal constructions containing objects of various origins: from musical instruments to sacks, from plaster casts to stones, from coats to glasses, from mechanical gears to fragments of furniture. The large interventions hosted in the central rooms of the two main floors of Ca’ Corner della Regina are included in this context. On the first level visitors will find three large-size works from 1994, 2011 and 2013 respectively. The most recent is made up of two train tracks that support six iron structures that echo his “cotton” piece (1967), each of which contains 200 kg (441 lbs) of various different materials within. The large room of the second floor hosts an intervention from 1993-2008 made up of different colored closets and forms hanging from the ceiling. Conceived for the first time for the spaces of Palazzo Belmonte Riso in Palermo, the work challenges the laws of gravity and, through the series of casually opened doors, seems to imitate the impossible perspectives of baroque painting. In terms of external interventions, already as early as 1967 Kounellis dealt with the motifs of gravity and equilibrium in his works, taking advantage of the formal and imaginative possibilities of the act of hanging an object. However, it wasn’t until the 1980s and 1990s that he developed a deeper dialogue with architectural and urban spaces. Both of these aspects would result in the monumental 1992’s installation presented in the internal courtyard of the Venetian palazzo. Originally conceived for the external façade of a building in Barcelona, it is composed of seven metal plates that support sacks filled with coffee beans.

Info: Curator: Germano Celant, Fondazione Prada, Ca’ Corner della Regina, Calle de Ca’ Corner, Santa Croce 2215, Venice, Duration: 11/5-24/11/19, Days & Hours: Mon & Wed-Sun 10:00-18:00, www.fondazioneprada.org