Untitled

Material

Wire and oil lamps on iron plate; 200 x 360 cm

Datierung

1990

About the artist

The Italian artist of Greek descent moved to Italy in 1956 and has been living in Rome since 1960. In the 1970s Kounellis was among the main representatives of Arte Povera. After producing images of scripture, numbers and letters, all of which were presented as scores, Kounellis was increasingly concerned with poetic situations, in which nature and artificial structures confronted each other. Therein he included material contrasts, as much as surprising alienation effects – 11 horses were ‘displayed’ in a gallery in 1967 – and quotations of historical-cultural conventions – as for example in works on Appollon. In the mid-1970s he begins his works on mural closures using diverse materials – stones, plaster figures, wooden panels, pieces of furniture – and the wall installations, in which he brings different raw materials of distinct texture, such as fire, gas, grime, steel, sacking, or lead into a poetic interplay. Without intent to conceptual clearness, Kounellis envisions descriptive images, in which seemingly contradictory conditions – tradition and progress, dead and living material, the social and the individual – meet each other.