Art Basel Paris 2026

This work by Jannis Kounellis belongs to the Alfabeti series, which began shortly after Jannis Kounellis developed works inspired by urban signage. Influenced by his experiences in Rome's everyday life, these combinations of letters, numbers, and symbols represented the personal language of the artist. Using various types of paper, Kounellis applies these symbols with stencils and eliminates the traces of the "artist's hand”. 

Among his many explorations of language and material, this work presents bold black symbols with tempera on paper. The choice of paper is not arbitrary, it is introducing a subtle tension between material and form. Another crucial feature of these works is their size: 70 x 100 cm, the standard format for Italian drawing paper. This dimension is not incidental but reflects Kounellis’ deep understanding of materiality and format, becoming iconic within his practice. 

These works encapsulate the Artist’s mastery of contrast, unique and distinct within his oeuvre; not just between black and the pale ground, but between solidity and vulnerability, assertion and silence. They remind us that his exploration of language was never just about the mark itself, but about the tension between the mark and the world it inhabits, “a whisper rather than a declaration, yet one that resonates with equal intensity”.

Initiated around 1949–50, Giuseppe Capogrossi’s Superfici mark the full emergence of his mature abstract language. At the centre of these works is the distinctive form-sign that would become the defining element of his practice. Repeated across the painted surface, this sign no longer functions as an image in the traditional sense, but as a means of constructing space and establishing an internal visual order.

Through subtle variations in scale, placement and repetition, Capogrossi transformed this deliberately reduced vocabulary into a remarkably flexible language. Each composition develops its own rhythm and spatial tension, while remaining part of a broader and highly coherent investigation into the possibilities of the pictorial surface. The Superfici therefore occupy a central position within post-war Italian abstraction, embodying Capogrossi’s singular approach to painting as a field governed by the relationships between sign and space.