Background
Jannis Kounellis was born on March 23, 1936 in Piraeus, Greece.
Jannis Kounellis was born on March 23, 1936 in Piraeus, Greece.
Jannis studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome.
The artist's first exhibition called "L’alfabeto di Kounellis" took place in Rome in 1960. Since then, Kounellis constantly exhibited in galleries and museums around the world.
During the second half of the 1960s, the artist became one of the creators and principal representatives of the Arte Povera movement.
Though Kounellis began his career making painting, he gravitated quickly toward working in three dimensions. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, he helped forge remarkable innovations, opening up painting and sculpture to chance and performance, injecting them with ephemeral experiences, and, often, doses of delicious humor. For instance, his Da inventare sul posto, which was shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2014, is a painting bearing a section of Stravinsky’s La Pulcinella - a violinist periodically appears in the gallery to perform along with a ballerina, who improvises a dance.
In the second half of the 1990s, Jannis was a professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.
Jannis Kounellis was mostly known as one of the originators of the Arte Povera movement.
Kounellis’s work was exhibited widely and championed by the leading curators of his time. He appeared in the Venice Biennale’s main exhibition in 1993, 1988, 1984, 1980, 1978, 1976, 1974 and 1972, and was part of the Italian pavilion at the show in 2015.
In October 2009, Kounellis exhibited many works at Tate Modern Gallery in London, United Kingdom.
Quotations:
"I don't want to delve into the past for archeological pleasure - though it could have been that - but because the past has a reality which conditions us deep down. Then if you bring it slowly to the surface, it's full of possibilities."
"I don't know if I'm making myself clear, but if I were to accept this business of conceptual art I would have no reason to exist."
At the age of 17, Jannis married his high school sweetheart, Efthimia Sardi, known as Efi. Some time later, they separated. The couple gave birth to their son, Damiano.
