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12/8/2005

Jannis Kounellis

Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh

13 August 2005 - 8 January 2006
SCOTTISH NATIONAL GALLERY OF MODERN ART

14 August - 18 September 2005
EDINBURGH COLLEGE OF ART

Supported by Istituto Italiano di Cultura

The first exhibition in Scotland by one of Italy's leading postwar artists is set to be one of the highlights of this year's Edinburgh Arts Festival. In a special collaboration between the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and Edinburgh College of Art, Jannis Kounellis, Works 1958-2005 will bring together paintings, sculptures and multiples (small sculptures produced in editions) that chart the development, over five decades, of an extraordinary career. The exhibition, which opens this week, will also showcase two major new installations by Kounellis, one of which has been commissioned specially for Edinburgh.

Now approaching seventy, and still working in his prime, Jannis Kounellis is an elder statesman of contemporary European art and remains a hugely influential figure. From 14 August until 18 September, the College of Art will be showing his Untitled, 2004, a large installation originally made at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford last year. A larger, retrospective display of Kounellis's work, on show at the Gallery of Modern Art from 13 August until 8 January 2006, will be complimented by a completely new work, which will dramatically transform the largest gallery on the top floor of the building.

Born in the Greek port city of Piraeus in 1936, Kounellis moved to Rome in 1956, and has lived and worked there ever since. The exhibition will begin with paintings from the late-Fifties and early Sixties, in which the artist introduced the real world in the form of painted signs - words, letters, numbers and arrows. Kounellis is best known as a founder of Arte Povera (literally 'Poor Art'), a grouping of Italian artists which emerged in 1967. The term refers to the group's abandonment of traditional artistic media (paint, bronze, marble), in favour of a much broader range of more mundane, everyday (or 'poor') materials. Suggestive of many different human activities, the individual qualities of these materials, and their relationship to each other when placed in combination, were used to evoke powerful associations, memories and emotions in the viewer.

Kounellis's work of the late-Sixties incorporated industrial metals and other hard structures, which he juxtaposed with soft or organic (even living) things. The disparate elements of one 1967 work included cacti, steel containers and a live parrot, and in 1969 the artist famously brought eleven horses into a gallery in Rome. Kounellis and his colleagues aimed to present the world directly (not as a painted or sculpted representation), and to encourage historical associations in their work. The Gallery of Modern Art will show a key work of 1969, which consists of seven burlap sacks, filled respectively with coffee beans, lentils, rice, dried peas, potatoes, and two types of bean. Through both sight and smell we are reminded of old-fashioned grocery stores and of how ports like Piraeus used to be, with goods shipped in from all parts of the world.

Using and reusing specific materials and objects in his exhibitions, Kounellis has created a rich and reverberating visual language of his own. Coal, from which we produce heat and light, is often used in his work, and is associated with human imagination and emotions. In contrast, steel, in its rigid predetermined forms, may be said to reflect the workings of our rational, analytical minds. In Untitled, 1993, Kounellis makes such associations more explicit. Against a large rectangle of bright yellow paint, applied directly to the gallery wall, the artist has hung a single steel bed frame from a hook. The bed has implicit associations with the human form; the bright yellow is full of sun-like energy and warmth. It radiates outward, filling our field of vision. The work is a classic example of how Kounellis can convey, with the simplest of means, his deeply held humanist beliefs and his optimism about the human race despite all contrary evidence.

The enormous installation that Kounellis first made in Oxford last year will be re-installed in the Sculpture Court of Edinburgh College of Art. It consists of a forest of steel crosses stretching the full length of the room and standing on a floor of Middle Eastern and north African rugs. At one end, the end to which all the steel beams are pointing, hangs a black coat and hat, suspended from a beam by a meat hook. The hardness and aggression of the steel beam crosses are set against the relative softness and passivity of the rugs. Suspended between them are the hat and coat, suggestive as in earlier works by Kounellis of the common person. Steel beams and rugs appear in other works by Kounellis with general rather than specific associations, but, particularly in the light of recent world events, it is hard not to read into this work the clash of two religious ideologies. The voice of humanism associated with the hat and coat seems small and unheeded in the general conflict.

By contrast, the new work that Kounellis is making for the Gallery of Modern Art will radiate colour and light. In the large gallery on the top floor of the building Kounellis intends to divide the room in half by a curtain of coloured fragments hanging from a steel beam. Glinting in the light, this new work will present an ethereal and spiritual quality when juxtaposed to the dark brooding presence of Untitled 1990 with its black coal and dark steel. In a parallel with the artistic process itself, Kounellis suggest an alchemical transformation of base matter into pure spirit and enlightenment.

For further information and images please contact the National Galleries of Scotland Press Office on 0131 624 6247/6314/6332/6325 or pressinfo@nationalgalleries.org

Or Charlie Allen at Edinburgh College of Art on 0131 2216215 or c.allen@eca.ac.uk

13 August 2005 - 8 January 2006
SCOTTISH NATIONAL GALLERY OF MODERN ART, 75 Belford Road, Edinburgh
Admission free

14 August - 18 September 2005
EDINBURGH COLLEGE OF ART, 74 Lauriston Place, Edinburgh
Admission free

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