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9/6/2003

Jannis Kounellis

Monastero Armeno, Venezia

NEW INTERVENTIONS BY JANNIS KOUNELLIS AT THE ARMENIAN MONASTERY ON THE ISLAND OF SAN LAZZARO, VENICE

Jannis Kounellis will create new interventions, specially conceived for the courtyards, library and museum of the eighteenth century Armenian Monastery on the Island of San Lazzaro, Venice. The exhibition runs from 11 June to 4 September 2003.

Over the past forty years Jannis Kounellis's paintings, collages, sculptures, staged installations, 'environments' and performances, have been internationally acclaimed as much for their materiallity (Kounellis has been associated with the Arte Povera movement since the late nineteen sixties), forceful character and focus on the poetics of the human condition, as their ability to transform their immediate environment.

Set within the cloisters and rooms of the monastic complex on the island of San Lazzaro, Kounellis will not change his environment to fit the work, ie make architectural alterations or change the place of objects, but rather will work over an architecture and within a group of objects which carry thickly layered symbolical and historical suggestions and relationships.

Playing with space and vision, composition and configuration Kounellis will work with objects within the space and its architecture. He will emphasize light and colour and through the careful placement of three dimensional objects will figuratively place the visitor inside a painting. As Kounellis himself says his focus is to 'present and not represent... All of us, by means of our sight and our positional consciousness, compose and think afterwards about what we have composed in our representations of the world. That is why our nature is inevitably artistic with or without our recognition'.

The setting and creative process, a master artist working within such an exceptional site - a sacred space, links naturally to Kounellis's wider concerns both for himself and the viewer. He almost forces or teases his viewer to reflect upon his or her condition and consider what is sacred in it, through his interventions and wizadry which transform space into infinity and a single visitor into the citizens of the world /mankind. His work in its beautiful elegant crudity, offers his viewers questions rather than answers in its gentle insistence of his truths.

The project has been formualted by ART for The World, Geneva, a Non Governmental Organisation associated with the United Nations Department of Public Information, directed by Adelina von Furstenberg. Art for the World is inspired by article 27 of The Universal Decleration of Human Rights, which proclaims the essential value of creative activities for human well being and the importance of respecting differences and pluralism in any form of creative expression. This exhibition has been created under the patronage of the United Nation's Programme for Development (UNDP) and the City of Venice, and is supported by Lottomatica, Bormioli Rocco and the Gallery Christian Stein Milano/Torino.

A colour catalogue (80 pages) in English and Italian by Gloria Moure including illustrations of the works in situ will accompany the exhibition and will be available for purchase from July 2003 onwards.

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES:
Jannis Kounellis was born in Piraeus, Greece the ancient port of Athens in 1936. In 1956 he enrolled at the Accademia di Belle Arti, Rome, Italy, where he continues to live and work in between his wanderings and teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts in Dusseldorf, Germany .

In 1960 Kounellis had his first solo show in Rome and exhibited black and white canvases with letters and numbers stencilled on the surface, that demonstrated little painterliness, but included performance as the letters and numbers were 'sung' as they were painted.

Influenced by the non figurative painting of Alberto Burri as well as Lucio Fontana whose work offered an alternative to the Expressionism of Art Informel, Kounellis was looking to push painting into new territory. He was inspired also by the works of Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, and the earlier abstractions of Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian.

His paintings would gradually become sculptural and by 1963 he was using found elements in his paintings. His diverse materials from the late 1960's onwards included fire, earth, and gold sometimes alluding to his interest in alchemy. Burlap sacks were introduced as an homage to Burri, though they were stripped of the painting frame and exhibited as objects in space. Additional materials beyond the raw materials of stone, cotton and wool began to enter his works such as objets trouves such as bed frames, doorways and shelves, and also famously live animals with horses brought to the gallery in 1967 and later people too, in a performative dimension. Kounellis continued to build on his vocabulary of materials in the 1970's and 1980's including elements of traditional culture such as the music of Mozart, as well as indicators of commerce, transportation and economics such as fire and soot, mounds of coffee grounds, coal etc. These diverse found fragments dialogue with a general cultural history while also forming a rich and evocative history of meaning and language within Kounellis's own oeuvre.

His work developed as a spectacular mixture of painting, collages, and the staging of installations, performances or theatrical shows - interventions, designed to express the tensions and alienation of contemporary society, and the multiplicity, obscurity and fragmentation of its language. From 1967 he became associated with Arte Povera, after being included in an important group exhibition of the same name. The term was coined to refer to the humble materials sometimes described as detritus which others such as Kounellis were using to make their elemental, anti elitist art.

In 1967 Kounellis was included in the eponymous exhibition Arte povera e IM Spazio in Genoa. He had his first show in New York in 1972 at the Sonnabend Gallery. During the 1970's and 1980's his work was shown extensively and very internationally; amongst these was a solo show that travelled in the 1980's to several museums in Europe including the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Obra Social, Madrid; the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London; and the Staatliche Kunsthalle, Baden-Baden.

In 1985 the Musee d'Art Contemporain, Bordeaux mounted an important exhibition. The following year in 1986 the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago staged a retrospective which travelled on to the Musee d'Art Contemporain, Montreal. In 1994 Kounellis installed a selection of over 30 years of his work in a boat called Ionion and docked this floating retrospective in his home port of Piraeus. In 1996 the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid held a retrospective and in 1997 he had an exhibition at the Museum Ludwig Kelk, Cologne.

Kounellis has exhibited at the Venice Biennale on a number of occasions in 1974 and 1993.

Image: Jannis Kounellis , October 1996

Dates: 11 June - 4 September 2003

Times: Open daily on the sfternoons

Transport: Vaporetto no. 20 from San Zaccaria (near Piazza San Marco) at 15.10 runs

Groups: For special guided tours or for groups of 20 or above please call + 30 41 5260104 in advance

For further information and images please contact: ART for The World
T: + 41 22 789 15 55 or 41 22 789 15 57

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