The exhibition refers to the constant search for justice and freedom with an absolutely humanist approach. These ideas are embodied in four large format installations that combine multiple symbolic and poetic references evoked by the industrial and everyday materials that characterize the artist’s production.
The social and natural dimension of man is the theme that Jannis Kounellis invites us to reflect on in this exhibition. It explores the individual and psychic limits of the human being within society as a result of industrial development and the latter in shaping social systems throughout history. In these times of uncertainty and geopolitical restructuring, the poetic work with which Jannis Kounellis sets forth the complex of existence and its political consequences could illuminate us.
“From snake one becomes a beetle, from beetle to raven, from raven to Arab horse,
But you cannot return from horse to beetle.
In the ancient world, metamorphoses were a constant of history.
Death, the moment of balance between past and future, provides the measure.
Death as the origin of symmetry.
Symmetry as Metaphysics. “
Jannis Kounellis (Greece 1936 – Italy 2017)
Kounellis was born in Piraeus, Greece, in 1936, from a very young age he lives and works in Rome, Italy. He is one of the main representatives of Arte Povera, a movement coined by the Italian critic Germano Celant, in the 60’s that is characterized, among other things, by the symbolic use of primordial materials for the construction of a discourse that revolves around the presence and historical burden of art as an element of healing, a recording entity and a tool for narrative elaboration based on social conditions in postwar Europe.
His presence on the contemporary scene has become canonical as he is one of the few masters who have followed the avant-garde by contributing new forms of knowledge and understanding of the spirit of man, with a force capable of transforming forms of thought into historical becoming. His consummate career extends through more than five decades showing his work in diverse museums and galleries such as the Tate Modern in London, the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, the Donnaregina Museum of Contemporary Art in Naples, the Reina Sofía National Art Center Museum in Madrid, the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome and the Former Church of San Agustín in The Historic Center of Mexico City.
This exhibition has been made possible thanks to the support of
Galería Hilario Galguera.
