Jannis Kounellis

Published on the occasion of Kounellis's solo exhibition at Palazzo del Vignola, Todi, Italy (2014) and at Sprovieri, London (2015). Edited by Niccolò Sprovieri, director of Sprovieri, London, and including insighful essays by Bruno Corà and Rudi Fuchs.

 

Kounellis's efficacy lies in the manner of placing together the elements in poetic associations, and in the constantly reformulated relationship between sensibility and structure. This catalogue presents some of his most iconic installations, for example the intervention with living horses at L'Attico Gallery, Rome (1967) and the freshly butchered meat hung on steel hooks presented in Barcelona at the Espai Poblenou (1989) to document a life-long process which leads to one of the last installations of Kounellis, the one realised for Palazzo Vignola in Umbria and Sprovieri Gallery in London. In this installation, rows of black wool coats soaked in tar run along white walls. The coats hang on sharp pointed knives fitted in a horizontal binary made of iron beams. So the coats are pierced on the knives and hang as gloomy mutilated shapes.