Jannis Kounellis

Jannis Kounellis (Piraeus, 1936 – Rome, 2017), was a Greek-born artist who later became an Italian citizen, was a leading figure of Arte Povera. His approach centered on the recovery and reuse of discarded materials to create installations that sought to extend beyond the physical boundaries of painting, forging a connection between the artwork and its surrounding environment.Kounellis naturally aligned with the other Arte Povera artists around 1967. By then, he had already moved away from painting, which he had originally approached with an abstract style, and was experiencing a deepening crisis with the medium. This shift led him to incorporate performative elements into his work. Classical music, live animals, and natural materials like charcoal became recurring motifs in his installations, a practice he continued until just a few years before his passing in 2017.increasingly surreal in his later works. Though large in scale, Clemente’s work often conveys an uncanny and unabashed intimacy. Clemente has been compared to such painters as Georg Baselitz and David Salle.