Jannis Kounellis

Photograph by Toni Meneguzzo

The artist with an untitled work from 2008. Born in Greece, he has lived in Italy since age 19.

Photograph by Toni Meneguzzo

Kounellis resides primarily in Rome but also maintains this studio in Umbria.

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Just inside the entrance to the major survey of his work last winter at the Neue Nationalgalerie, in Berlin, Jannis Kounellis positioned one of his signature untitled installations: a dozen timeworn bentwood chairs facing one another in a large circle. After I visited the Berlin show, that enigmatic ring of chairs lingered in my mind. While walking around the city, I stumbled on something that seemed to make sense of it. The old Checkpoint Charlie, once the site of fraught passages between East and West Berlin, is now a tourist attraction, with a display of historic photographs. Among these is an image of the 1945 Potsdam Conference, at which the victorious Allies redrew the geopolitical map of Europe, showing the heavily clothed principals seated around a circular table. 

Did Kounellis know of this photograph before the Neue Nationalgalerie exhibition? When I meet him in his Rome studio not long afterward, I know that he will never answer unequivocally. Such questions matter little to him. What he wants is for his work to spark viewers’ emotional awareness of their times.

I ring the bell at his inconspicuous house, not far from the Vatican, and his partner of many years, Michelle Coudray, calls from a window above for me to take the stairs to the third floor. There, entering through a kitchen that gives immediately onto an office, I meet Kounellis, who greets me in Italian with a welcoming handshake. The apartment — far from new yet ageless in feel — is filled with eclectic furnishings probably acquired over many years. We sit at a massive dining table beneath windows with a view of nearly leafless trees outside. Kounellis lights a cigarette (the first of many), settling into the sober, but not humorless, demeanor that seems typical of him. Tousled and making no effort to disguise his age, 72, he comes across as a man continually preoccupied but not easily distracted.

Born in Piraeus, Greece, in 1936, Kounellis moved to Rome at age 19 to escape the civil war in his country and stayed. Fluent in Greek and Italian but not English, he relies on Coudray, who speaks a French-accented Italian, to translate. Does he consider himself an Italian artist? "I always have. A Greek-born person, but an Italian artist."

He studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome and in 1960, while still a student, had his first solo exhibition, at Galleria della Tartaruga, consisting of a group of paintings stenciled enigmatically with letters, numbers and arrows. These early "alphabet" paintings are now regarded as precursors of Arte Povera, or "poor art," the designation coined in 1967 by the Italian critic Germano Celant to denote the ambitious work of Kounellis and his contemporaries Giovanni Anselmo, Mario Merz, Giuseppe Penone, Michelangelo Pistoletto and Gilberto Zorio. To overcome the preciousness and gravity of the European tradition, these artists employed ostensibly nonart stuff in often anti-art gestures that self-consciously referenced the cultural past. They favored undefined installation pieces as ways of rejecting Italian art’s long service to church and state. Like Anselmo and Merz, Kounellis has employed natural with industrial materials, and he still relies on the sharp contrasts between the two. For decades he has returned repeatedly to such substances as steel, coal and scavenged wood, as well as to stone, wool, burlap and coffee (the scent of which permeates some of his installations) and sacks of grain. He has also famously incorporated live animals — birds, horses and fish — into his art.

Kounellis nearly always chooses mediums for their physically powerful but highly ambiguous associations. For example, although viewers may not immediately read the inert stacks of burlap sacks filled with corn, coffee beans and legumes as markers of the passage between production and consumption in a vast system of human survival, that is what Kounellis intends them to be. The seeming lack of context for these goods gradually awakens a sense of how seldom we think about the economic and industrial forces that form our habits as consumers.