Jannis Kounellis

Jannis Kounellis was born on 23 March 1936 in Piraeus, Greece, and moved to Rome in 1956, where he studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma under the painter Toti Scialoja. He remained rooted in Rome until his death on 16 February 2017, and over six decades of practice became one of the defining figures of Arte Povera — the Italian movement that dismantled the conventions of painting and sculpture by introducing raw, elemental, and living materials into the gallery space.

Kounellis's early work engaged directly with language and visual communication. L'Alfabeto di Kounellis, a series of painted signs and letters first shown at Galleria La Tartaruga in Rome in 1960, tested the boundary between painting and written sign, treating the canvas as a field of meaning rather than illusion. By the end of that decade he had moved toward a radically different proposition: in 1969 he installed twelve live horses inside a gallery — Senza titolo (12 cavalli) — replacing pictorial representation with unmediated physical presence and fundamentally challenging the autonomy of the art object. The work remains one of the most cited gestures in postwar art. His 1972 Untitled, now held in the Sonnabend Collection Foundation, extended this logic into time-based and socially activated territory, combining metal boxes, mirrors, iron plates engraved with musical scores, a figure holding a plaster mask, and a live flutist performing Mozart — collapsing sculpture, installation, performance, and theatrical staging into a single environment. Later works such as Untitled (2013), composed of steel plates, glassware, and metal shelves, and Untitled (Notte) (2015) demonstrate the persistence of his austere, materially charged vocabulary into the final years of his career.

Kounellis's work has been the subject of major institutional presentations across Europe and beyond. A solo exhibition at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid in 1996 and Il sarcofago degli sposi at the MAK in Vienna in 1999 marked significant moments in his international reception. Posthumous exhibitions have continued to expand critical engagement with his practice: a solo presentation at Lévy Gorvy in Paris in 2021, a solo at Cardi Gallery in Milan in 2023, and Jannis Kounellis: Alfabeto, Early Works on Paper at Sprovieri in London in 2025 have each brought distinct periods of his output into focus. A major traveling retrospective, Jannis Kounellis: Labyrinth without Walls, is currently on view at Es Baluard Museu d'Art Contemporani de Palma through August 2026, before traveling to the CGAC in Santiago de Compostela from September 2026 through February 2027. Concurrently, Jannis Kounellis: Io sono un pittore opens at the Collezione Giancarlo e Danna Olgiati in Lugano in September 2026, accompanied by a bilingual catalogue published by Mousse Publishing with contributions by Vincenzo de Bellis and Bruno Corà. His work is held in the collection of the Guggenheim Bilbao, among other institutions. The Estate of Jannis Kounellis and the Archivio Kounellis remain active in organizing loans and scholarly collaboration, and Barbara Gladstone Gallery represents the estate in New York and Brussels.