570 - Jannis Kounellis* (Piraeus 1936 - 2017 Rome)

Jannis Kounellis* (Piraeus 1936 - 2017 Rome) Loss of perpective, 2008 metal/cardboard 17 x 11 cm signed Kounellis from the series Art in Writing SCHÄTZPREIS / ESTIMATE € 400 - 600 STARTPREIS / STARTING PRICE € 400 Jannis Kounellis was a Greek-Italian artist and a central figure of the Arte Povera movement. Through installations, performances, drawings, and works involving objects, he expanded the concept of sculpture from the 1960s onwards, engaging with themes such as materiality, labor, memory, history, and social reality. In 1956, Kounellis moved from Greece to Rome to study at the Accademia di Belle Arti, where Toti Scialoja was among his teachers. His early works incorporated characters, numbers, and arrows against white backgrounds, thereby integrating signs associated with the modern city, advertising, and traffic into the realm of painting. By the mid-1960s, he increasingly moved away from the traditional easel painting, incorporating everyday and raw materials into his work. Kounellis utilized materials such as coal, iron, jute sacks, cotton, wool, stone, fire, soot, doors, bed frames, and found objects. The sensory and physical presence of these materials combined with an often theatrical staging of the exhibition space. His works explore contrasts such as nature and industry, movement and stasis, poverty and history, as well as body and object. A pivotal moment in his career was the 1969 work Untitled (12 Horses), for which Kounellis tethered twelve live horses inside the Galleria L’Attico in Rome. This piece radically challenged the boundaries between artwork, action, and life, becoming an iconic example of Arte Povera. Kounellis had previously participated in the seminal 1967 exhibition *Arte Povera – Im Spazio* in Genoa; the term "Arte Povera" had been coined by the art historian and curator Germano Celant. Kounellis lived and worked in Rome until his death on February 16, 2017. His works are held in major international collections, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Tate in London, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. PLEASE NOTE: The purchase price consists of the highest bid plus the buyer's premium, sales tax and, if applicable, the fee of artists resale rights and platform fee. In the case of normal taxation (marked ° at the estimate), a premium of 24% is added to the highest bid. The mandatory sales tax is added to the sum of the highest bid, the buyer's premium and platform fee. This amounts to 13% for paintings, drawings, graphic works and sculptures and 20% for photographs and all other items. The buyer's premium amounts to 28% in case of differential taxation. The sales tax is included in the differential taxation.