JANNIS KOUNELLIS

Curator: Elisabeth Thoman-Oberhofer, Innsbruck

JANNIS KOUNELLIS
born in Piraeus (Athens) in 1936, has lived in Rome since 1958. He made a name for himself in the Roman art scene in 1960 and surfaced, with extraordinary intuition and creative force, in the arte povera movement – the first contemporary Italian art movement to be recognized on an international level. With a group of artists from Turin, Milan and Rome he broke fresh ground with a new form of installation art that left its mark on the development of international art during the last decades of the twentieth century.

Using materials that were initially considered unusual – wool, coal, live animals, plants, theatrical sets – and endowed with a particularly keen sixth sense, Kounellis was the first to attempt to eliminate the ideological boundary that separates life from art, ethics from aesthetics, creation from production, and the social and political from the individual and anarchic. His intense artistic odyssey, made up of more than four decades of fervent and impassioned activity, goes well beyond the borders of the Mediterranean. His work, at times monumental and complex, has over the years acquired such importance and regard that he has become a key protagonist in the international art scene. His installations are often situations to be experienced rather than exhibitions to merely visit and observe. (Dieter Roelstraete) The exhibition at the Kunstraum Innsbruck will be created in situ by the artist himself.

He may well be the most important protagonist of the Arte Povera movement that emerged in Italy in the 1960ies. In the course of the recent decades Kounellis, with his frequently monumental, very complex works, has become a key figure in the contemporary international art scene. In his projects he contemplates the question of historical and cultural identity past and present. The dramatization of painting and thus of art in general, as it had been demanded by himself, he realized by incorporating vital reality, replacing representation with presence. With his œuvre Kounellis has liberated pictorial space. Space itself turns into the actual surface, the stage on which – with materials like coal, cotton, iron, fire – he creates scenes that have no temporal structure. In contrast to exhibitions one merely visits and looks at his installations often rather are situations to be experienced.