Jannis Kounellis è uno degli artisti più rappresentativi dell’Arte Povera, noto per le sue installazioni e performance che esplorano il rapporto tra materia, spazio e storia. Il suo approccio radicale e la sua capacità di trasformare oggetti quotidiani in simboli potenti hanno segnato in modo indelebile l’arte contemporanea.
In 2001, for the VI edition of Art to Art, Kounellis realised A work for Montalcino, un intervento che è stato successivamente trasformato in un’opera permanente, creando un legame duraturo tra l’arte e il territorio.
Nel 2015, l’artista ha partecipato alla seconda edizione del progetto ArtexVino = Water,creating the wine label Tenuta San Guido, Guidalberto I.G.T. Tuscany.
Jannis Kounellis He was born in Piraeus in 1936 and in 1956 moved to Rome, where he still lives. Since the late 1950s, he has been a key figure in the Roman art scene, in the ancient imperial Mediterranean city, one of the Italian cities that is a temple and cradle of great European art. He established himself from his earliest pictorial works, which marked a fundamental break in the tradition of painting, overcoming the impasse created between figuration, abstraction and matter, and turning towards the evidence of the sign. In the second half of the Sixties, he achieved what is known as ’leaving the frame‘, using both plants and animals (from parrots to horses) and ’poor' materials (from raw wool to coal) for the composition of his works. By virtue of this radical, and in its own way revolutionary, choice, he is among the Italian artists who gave rise to the Arte Povera movement, the most important group experience produced by 20th-century Italian art after Futurism. His evolution continued along these lines in the Seventies, during which his search for a high and universal language was manifested in the identification of powerful sources of energy such as the body, fire, music, and the recovery of the mythical and historical past of his Greek and Mediterranean origins.
In the following two decades, there was continued expansion that encompassed both space and the very concept of the artwork itself. From this point onwards, the artwork was no longer limited to its immediate surroundings but transcended them with a titanic will for totality. The parergon, that which is not part of the work surrounding the work, dissolved, and the artwork became the driving core of unlimited expansion. Kounellis has held solo exhibitions in the most important museums in the world, from the Boymans-van Beuningen in Rotterdam to the Stadtisches Museum Abteiberg in Monchengladbach, from the Museum Folkwang in Essen to the ARC in Paris, from the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven to the Museum Haus Esters in Krefeld, from the CAPC in Bordeaux to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, from Castello di Rivoli to the Museo di Capodimonte in Naples, from the HaagsGemeentemuseum in The Hague to the Kestner-Gesellschaft in Hanover, from the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow to the Kunsthalle in Hamburg, from the Reina Sofía in Madrid to the Museo Pecci in Prato. He has participated various times in the biennials of Paris and Venice and in Documenta in Kassel, as well as major exhibitions such as Arte povera+azioni povere in Amalfi, Op Losse Schroeven in Amsterdam, When Attitudes Become Form in Bern, Amore mio in Montepulciano, Contemporanea in Rome, Identité italienne in Paris, Zeitgeist in Berlin, Skulptur im 20. Jahrhundert in Basel, Terrae Motus in Herculaneum, Chambres d’amis in Ghent, Wounds in Stockholm.