JANNIS KOUNELLIS

Venice 11 May – 24 Nov 2019

“Jannis Kounellis”, curated by Germano Celant, is the first vast retrospective dedicated to the artist after his death in 2017.
The project, developed in collaboration with the Kounellis Archive, brings together more than 60 works from 1959 to 2015, coming from museums and important private collections in Italy and abroad. The exhibition reconstructs the artistic and exhibition history of Kounellis (Piraeus 1936 – Rome 2017) trying to establish a dialogue between the works and the eighteenth-century spaces of Ca' Corner della Regina.

The artist's first works, originally exhibited between 1960 and 1966, are presented in some rooms on the first floor of the Venetian palace and deal with urban language. In a first phase they reflect writings, signs and signs present in the streets of Rome and, subsequently, they contain black letters, arrows and numbers traced on canvas, paper or other white supports. They convey a decomposition of language in accordance with the fragmentation of reality which, since 1964, has been recomposed in subjects taken from nature, from sunsets to roses, the latter attached to the canvases with automatic buttons. Since 1967, with the aim of overcoming the traditionally pictorial uniformity of his first production, Kounellis' research becomes more radical to incorporate concrete and natural elements such as earth, cactus, wool, coal, cotton and fire.

We move from written and pictorial language to physical and environmental one. The use of organic and inorganic entities transforms his language into a bodily experience, understood as sensorial transmission. The artist explores in particular the sound dimension in which the painting translates into a score to be set to music or to dance, already since 1960 with Kounellis himself reciting his letters on canvas and since 1970 with the presence of a musician or a dancer. The investigation of olfactory perception, which began in 1969 with coffee, continued in the XNUMXs with substances such as grappa, to escape the illusory limits of the picture and connect with the vital chaos of reality.

“Jannis Kounellis” Prada Foundation Venice. Photo Agostino Osio – Alto Piano

In the installations created since the end of the 1960s, the artist triggers a dialectical clash between the lightness, instability, temporality of the natural element and the heaviness, permanence and rigidity of industrial structures, represented by modular surfaces in painted metal grey. Kounellis participates in exhibitions that contribute to the development of Arte Povera, whose membership translates into an authentic form of visual expression that interprets ancient culture in a contemporary key, in contrast with the loss of historical and political identity after the Second World War.

Since 1967, the date of the so-called "daisy of fire", the phenomenon of combustion often appears in the artist's work: a "writing of fire" that emphasizes its transformative and regenerating potential. At the top of this change, according to the alchemical tradition, is the gold that the artist uses in multiple situations. In the installation Senza titolo (Civil tragedy) from 1975, the contrast between the gold leaf covering a bare wall and the black of the clothes, hanging on a coat rack, testifies to the drama of a scene that alludes to a historical and personal crisis. In Kounellis' path, smoke, also linked to fire, functions both as a residue of a pictorial process and as evidence of the passage of time. The traces of soot on the stones, canvases and walls in some works from 1979 and 1980 indicate a personal "return to painting", in opposition to the a-ideological and hedonistic approach of much pictorial production of the XNUMXs.

Throughout his research Kounellis develops a tragic and personal relationship with culture and history, avoiding a courtly and reverential attitude. He manages to represent the past with an incomplete set of fragments of classical statues as in the 1974 work. In other works the Greco-Roman heritage is explored through the mask, as in the 1973 installation consisting of a wooden frame on which plaster casts of faces are arranged. Another emblem of the artist's intolerance towards his own time is the door. The gaps between the rooms are closed with stones, wood, iron rods and lead sheets, making some rooms inaccessible so as to enhance their unknown, metaphysical and surreal dimension.

“Jannis Kounellis” Prada Foundation Venice. Photo Agostino Osio – Alto Piano

The exhibition itinerary is completed by some large installations, created by Kounellis starting from the late 1992s. These sets, which multiply the modular elements of historical works to appropriate the space, incorporate shelves or metal constructions that contain objects of various origins: from plaster casts to stones, from coats to glasses and mechanical gears. The large interventions hosted in the central rooms of the two main floors of Ca' Corner della Regina fit into this context. The themes of gravity and balance and the comparison with architectural and urban space find a monumental realization in the XNUMX installation, proposed again in the internal courtyard of the Venetian palace. Conceived for the external facade of a building in Barcelona, ​​it is made up of seven metal plates to support bags containing coffee beans.

The retrospective is completed by the presentation on the ground floor of films, catalogues, invitations, posters and archive photographs that testify to Kounellis' exhibition history and by a focus dedicated to his projects in the theatrical field. The exhibition is accompanied by a volume which, with an essay by Germano Celant and an extensive illustrated chronology, documents and explores the artist's biographical and professional journey. Designed by New York studio 2×4, the book is published by Fondazione Prada.