Jannis Kounellis Artwork valuations, appraisals and auction estimates

Jannis Kounellis (in Greek: Γιάννης Κουνέλλης; Piraeus, 23 March 1936 – Rome, 16 February 2017) was a Greek naturalized Italian painter and sculptor, a leading exponent of what the critic Germano Celant defined as "arte povera".

Born in Piraeus, Attica, after being rejected by the School of Fine Arts in Athens, in 1956, in his early twenties, he left Greece and moved to Italy, to Rome. In the Italian capital he enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts under the guidance of Toti Scialoja to whom he owed the influence of abstract expressionism which together with informal art constituted the fundamental combination from which his creative path began. Read the full biography

Jannis Kounellis Biography

Jannis Kounellis (in Greek: Γιάννης Κουνέλλης; Piraeus, 23 March 1936 – Rome, 16 February 2017) was a Greek naturalized Italian painter and sculptor, a leading exponent of what the critic Germano Celant defined as "arte povera".

Born in Piraeus, Attica, after being rejected by the School of Fine Arts in Athens, in 1956, in his early twenties, he left Greece and moved to Italy, to Rome. In the Italian capital he enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts under the guidance of Toti Scialoja to whom he owed the influence of abstract expressionism which together with informal art constituted the fundamental combination from which his creative path began. He made his debut in 1960 by staging his first personal exhibition in Rome at the "La Tartaruga" gallery. The first exhibitions ideologically close to the Arte Povera movement date back to 1967, in which the use of commonly used products and materials suggests a radically creative, mythical function for art, devoid of concessions to mere representation. The references to the Greek origins are also evident. His installations become real sets that physically occupy the gallery and surround the viewer, making him the protagonist in a space that also begins to fill with live animals, contrasted with geometries built with materials that evoke industrial production. In the "Daisy of Fire" fire also appears, a mythical and symbolic element par excellence, generated however by a torch cylinder. In 1969 the installation becomes a real performance with the Horses tied to the walls of Fabio Sargentini's L'Attico gallery, in a sumptuous ideal clash between nature and culture in which the artist's role is reduced to the minimum level of essentially manual, almost like a hardworking man. With the transition to the seventies, Kounellis' strong-willed enthusiasm takes on a different heaviness, the result of disenchantment and frustration in the face of the failure of the innovative potential of poor art, swallowed up against his will by the commercial dynamics of the consumer society, presided over by the spaces traditional uses such as museums and galleries. This feeling is expressed by the famous door closed with stones presented for the first time in San Benedetto del Tronto and then over the years, with significant structural variations full of poetic meanings, in Rome, Mönchengladbach, Baden-Baden, London, Cologne. In 1972 Kounellis participated in the Venice Biennale for the first time. In more recent years, Kounellis' art has become virtuously manneristic and has taken up themes and suggestions that had previously characterized it with a more meditative spirit, capable of interpreting the primitive propensity for monumental emphasis with a renewed awareness. Examples of this new direction of research are the Offertorio installation of 1995 in Piazza del Plebiscito, in Naples and the exhibition in Mexico in 1999. Naples, 1998 “Mulino in ferro” permanent exhibition in Piazza Ponte di Tappia. In the ancient courtyard of the central building of the University of Padua, he created a monument for the fiftieth anniversary of the Resistance in 1995, a splendid assembly of wooden planks, collected near the city, to evoke the fatigue and unity of the Resistance, to to which the University made such a contribution that it was the only institution awarded the gold medal for military valor in Italy. Major exhibitions continue in South America, such as those in Argentina (2000) and Uruguay (2001). In 2002, the artist re-proposes the installation of the horses at the Whitechapel in London and, shortly afterwards, at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome he builds an enormous sheet metal labyrinth along which he places, almost as if they were so many landing places, the traditional elements of his art, such as the "coal pits", the "cotton pits", the jute bags and the heaps of stones ("Single Act"). In 2004 he created an installation in the Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence, within the temporary exhibition Forme per il David, created to celebrate the five hundred years since the creation of Michelangelo's David. In 2007 he created two installations in Calabria: With Mattia Preti at the National Gallery of Palazzo Arnone in Cosenza, and A light touch like the wings of a sparrow at the National Archaeological Museum of Sibaritide in Sibari. In 2007 he worked on the creation of the 383rd feast of Santa Rosalia in Palermo, designing the Saint's triumphal chariot. Also in 2007, the Gate of the Monastic Garden of the Basilica of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme inaugurated in Rome, an imposing iron gate embellished with chromatic elements made of glass stones. In 2009, the Fumagalli Gallery and the Adriano Bernareggi Museum (Bergamo) respectively dedicated a solo exhibition and a single site-specific installation to the artist. The artist creates a special display of works proposing a reflection on art and man, testimony to the poetic reflections that have always been at the center of his work and for which he was indicated as a possible guest at the 2011 Venice Biennale of the first pavilion of the Vatican CITY. Furthermore, in 2012, one of his famous works was exhibited at the Riso contemporary art museum in the city of Palermo.