Jannis Kounellis

Galleria La Tartaruga, Rome
Private Collection, Pennsylvania (acquired circa 1964)
Thence by descent to the present owner

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the background is lighter in the original and does not tends towards grey as suggested in the catalogue illustration. Condition: The work is in very good condition. There is very soft undulation to the collaged map towards the bottom left corner, inherent to the artist's choice of media. There is very faint wear to the bottom left corner and in places to all extreme edges. Close inspection reveals very thin and stable networks of craquelure and further cracks to the bottom half of the canvas. No restoration is apparent under ultra violet light.
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Poetically evocative and emotionally loaded, Untitled from 1963 gives visual form to key moments of Kounellis's personal history. In 1956, the twenty year-old Kounellis left Greece to start a new life in Italy, landing in Rome where he enrolled at the Accademia delle Belle Arti. Having lived through the desperate years of the Second World War and subsequent Greek Civil War, Kounellis turned his back on his country embracing a different culture and social history. As the artist would later declare: "I am a Greek person but an Italian artist. [...] I want to leave Greece behind me." (the artist cited in: Exhibition Catalogue, Milano, Refettorio delle Stelline, Kounellis, 1998, p. 17).

Untitled recounts the history of this life-changing journey. The beautifully evanescent sea represents a bridge between the past and the future for the artist. The stencilled word Pireo, situated on the right side of the canvas, indicates the primary Greek port Piraeus as nostalgic metaphor for Kounellis' past. Contrastingly on the left hand side, a collaged map of the city of Rome is delicately incorporated into the canvas and visible only upon close inspection below a thin veil of white paint. Light pastel hues of blue, green and pink magically define the shape of the waves of the intermediating Mediterranean scene in a sublime exhibition of delicate brushwork and serene colour.

For Kounellis, one of the greatest exponents of Arte Povera, Rome symbolised an escape from his past and became the crucible for the start of his artistic career, with his first solo exhibition opening at Galleria La Tartaruga in 1960. During this period in Rome, Kounellis encountered the contemporaneous artistic discourse of influential artists such as Alberto Burri, Lucio Fontana and Piero Manzoni as well as Cy Twombly and Robert Rauschenberg, who were also exhibiting at Galleria La Tartaruga. From their Art Informel, Spatialism and Abstract Expressionism, Kounellis absorbed the challenge of overcoming traditional representation and the spatial boundaries of the canvas. Kounellis's paintings from the early 1960s result from his search to depict a new immaterial world, which he filtrated through the Modernist concept of Absolute Abstraction; a dominant influence on post-war Italian Art. Indeed, Malevich's Suprematist concept of 'non-objectivity' as a way to obtain an absolute and transcendent reality beyond form constantly appears in Kounellis's art as a recurring theme.

The magnificent white background of Untitled is typical of Kounellis's style from this pivotal period, in which he painted numbers, letters and words on blank surfaces. Instead of representing images, Kounellis presented a world dematerialized in linguistic fragments in his canvases. Eduardo Cicely described Kounellis's conceptual Abstraction as: "a language of art, which transcribes reality without representing it, presenting it in its essential form, which is the material dialectics of history and nature." (Eduardo Cicely in: Exhibition Catalogue, Prato, Centro per l'Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Kounellis, 2001, p. 296). This body of paintings is one of the earliest and most important explorations into the complex relationship between text and image, one that was to exert a strong influence over the work of Bruce Nauman and Joseph Kosuth. Their infamous questioning of conventional relationships between language, art and life by presenting juxtapositions in a deliberately ambiguous context owes much to the unprecedented work of Kounellis.

By flattening the perspective of the composition and simplifying the forms of the landscape, Kounellis instills Untitled with an evocative and metaphysical atmosphere of emptiness, which recalls the Surrealistic and Classical legacy of Giorgio de Chirico. Of course, Kounellis shared with the latter the same Greek-Italian background and deep-rooted consciousness of classical humanism. As observed by Marco Meneguzzo: "it is possible to speak of classicism in Kounellis's work: everything goes back to the primigenial unity, to the man who is also humanism." (Marco Meneguzzo in: Exhibition Catalogue, Milano, Refettorio delle Stelline, Kounellis, 1998, p. 31). However, Kounellis filters his humanistic cultural sphere through a unique conceptual reading.

Through a harmoniously structured composition of heightened tranquility, Untitled combines abstract, plastic and conceptual elements, while also charting the journey of the artist's personal history. Kounellis's artistic dialect is deeply rooted in life circumstances as he described: "I seek dispersed history in emotional and formal fragments. I am dramatically looking for unity, even if hard to grasp, albeit utopian, albeit impossible and, for that reason dramatic." (the artist cited in: Exhibition Catalogue, Milano, Refettorio delle Stelline, Kounellis, 1998, p. 255).