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46, rue de la Ferté-Gaucher, 77169 Boissy-le-Châtel, France Tel. +33 (0)1 64 20 39 50 / [email protected] / www.galleriacontinua.com Jannis Kounellis 18/10/2015 - 20/12/2015 Opening Sunday 18 October 2015, noon - 6 pm Wednesdays to Sundays, from Noon to 6 pm

GALLERIA CONTINUA is proud representation along with a radical ‘escape from the canvas’ provided Kounellis in 1967 with the to present for the first time at language that he has been using ever since to the Moulin de Boissy a solo articulate a spatiality he extracts from diffe- rent places and contexts. exhibition by one of the chief Kounellis’ voyage has its origins in the protagonists of postwar Italian libertarian and visionary impulse of an art founded on an extreme, dialectical mobility in art, Jannis Kounellis. Kounellis has respect to places, individuals, and signs. The di- been a major international figure mension of time has always been one of the prin- ciple concerns of his work, worked out through for the last forty-five years, a constant confrontation with history, overs- present on five continents and in tepping the present and ceaselessly stimulating many of the most prestigious a tension between the past and the future. In this context, his work seems not to be influen- collections and museums in the ced by current events, but by universal, timeless world. This exhibition brings themes. ‘I look among emotional and formal frag- ments for deviations from history’, the artist together the artist’s most affirms. ‘I am desperately searching for unity, recent works. even if this is inaccessible, utopian, impossible, and, precisely for this reason, dramatic.’ Having Kounellis’ work stood out from the begin- contributed to the birth and development of ning for its search for a new kind of spatiality. , Kounellis has in more recent years He identified this new conception with the hun- come to orient his work around the problems as- dreds of kilos of coal he piled up on the floor sociated with the role of the artist and the so- of his studio. This material became for him the cial mission of art in contemporary society. means of a new pictorial conception. The use of materials long considered to be non-pictorial Jannis Kounellis’ works are infused with a brought him face to face with forms, colours, profound lyricism and take on austere form. The and smells distinctive to natural, primary, and lexical field of his visual language relates to the technological matter, which then, reinvigorated sensible, to the life and legacy of Man: he tou- through the mechanisms provided by the artist’s ches upon the most intrinsic aspects of human imagination and his passions, as by myth, culture, experience, the ancestral signs of places. Kou- and classical and religious ideals, underwent a nellis works with ‘structures of resistance’ that transformation into poetic energies. The aban- have their own weight and elude everything that donment of a traditional concept of pictorial is vague and suggestive. Whether doors, large 2/ windows filled with rocks or books, fragments of Jannis Kounellis was born in in sculptures or stone columns, these structures Greece in 1936. He has lived and worked in restore sovereignty and power to common mat- since the late ’50s. His paintings from this pe- ter. At other times, they may take on the form riod show words, letters, numbers and directio- of thin metallic walls, supporting shelves laid with nal signs traced over monochromatic surfaces, bags, by turns empty and full. bringing visual signals from an urban context into pictorial language. In 1968, he participa- The centre of the exhibition space is oc- ted in the ‘Arte Povera + Azioni Povere’ exhi- cupied by a large installation specially concei- bition at the Antichi Arsenali in Amalfi. In 1967, ved for the Moulin de Boissy. The wardrobes in he participated in ‘Arte Povera – Im Spazio’ at this piece have been used by the artist before, the Galleria La Bertesca in . His celebra- having appeared in other important works and ted work in which twelve living horses make up exhibitions, including in the Piazza del Plebisci- the installation was exhibited in Rome, at the to in Naples in 1996. Wardrobes interest Jannis Galleria L’Attico, in 1969. At this time he star- Kounellis for their capacity for receiving, for ted to create large installations using natural containing, while evoking the simple universe of materials and everyday objects, including living common people. Here he uses the wardrobes to beings, rocks, cacti, coffee grounds, carded describe a circle, traversed in its centre by a wool, hessian sacks both empty and full of grain, line of coal, another material that has been pre- blowtorch flames, fragments of reproductions sent in his work for many years. This ‘corridor’ of classical sculptures, oil lamps, metal shelves, cuts the circle, introduces a straight, geome- and rails. Since the beginning, he has also made trical division into the agglomeration of bodies. works and sets for the theatre. In more recent The cut evokes the rapidity of the unerring, work, one continues to find everyday objects, precise gesture of a painter. Strong and clear, including furniture, arranged within his monumen- it separates out a body made up of memories and tal installations. Since 1972, Kounellis has parti- intimate, human histories. cipated seven times in the (one Beneath the mezzanine, one finds a num- of his works was exhibited in the Italian Pavi- ber of panels that together form the word NOT- lion this year), and twice in in Kassel TE (Night), evoking a particular atmosphere, a (in 1972 and 1982). He exhibited at the Musée moment of hesitation. The word appears without de l’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1980, at either positive or negative connotation: it is, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and rather, an observation, a realisation. It is indi- at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1990, at cative neither of a frozen condition, nor a flat the Museo Nacional Centro Reina Sofia in Madrid chromatism. The work, on the contrary, acts as a in 1996, at the Ludwig Museum in Cologne in 1997, sort of theatre. at the Museo Pecci in Prato in 2002, at the Mu- The exhibition also brings together a seo Madre in Naples in 2006, at the Neue National series of works each the same size and made Galerie in Berlin in 2007, at the Museo Heart in with metallic materials and black coats. Indus- Herning in 2009, at the Today Art Museum in Bei- trial beams, sheet metal and clothing inform one jing and at the National Center For Contempo- another in a contrasting poetry of matter. The rary Art in Moscow in 2011, at the Museum of Cy- size of the paintings, 180 x 200 cm, marks them cladic Art in Athens in 2012 and the Musée d’art with the measure of Man, something Kounellis is contemporain de Saint-Étienne in 2014. continually communicating to his work. Appearing likewise in his use of doors, windows, and wardro- bes, this measure is perhaps the clearest sta- tement of Jannis Kounellis’ humanism.