Blain|Southern
Jannis Kounellis
17 November 2012 – 26 January 2013

Potsdamer Straße 77–87, 10785, Berlin
Tues – Sat: 11.00 – 18.00
+49 (0)30 6449 31510

 

The Directors of Blain|Southern are delighted to present an exhibition
of new and recent works by Jannis Kounellis. Renowned for his pivotal
role in the development of the Arte Povera movement in the
1960s, over the last 50 years Kounellis has continued to redefine
artistic practice through his original use of materials.
His works, which might be seen as a combination of painting, collage,
installation, ‘environments’, performance and theatre, are made using
everyday materials such as soil, coal, stones, hessian sacks, fire, live
animals, bed frames and doorways, as well as objets trouvés.
These are imbued with dramatic power, stimulating memory and a sense of
history, as well as the reality of our present day experience, to
express the underlying tensions within contemporary society, and the
multiplicity and fragmentation of its language.
During the twenty first century, Kounellis has developed an
increasingly architectural vocabulary, typified by the labyrinth he
constructed in the main hall of Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie for his
2008 retrospective. Working in dialogue with the Mies van der Rohe
designed building, the structure served as a complete environment in
which to exhibit examples of his earlier works. His exhibition at
Blain|Southern has been created in a similar vein, with the sculptural
installation responding to the gallery’s vast, post-industrial space.
A large-scale musical pentagrama is evoked through the interplay of
incongruous materials including black canvases, steel cables, iron bars
and knives. The geometric composition is layered in space, transforming
the immediate environment into a series of repeated and rhythmical
sculptural notations. The canvases, of varying size, directly relate to
the precise dimensions of historical works which have influenced
Kounellis, by artists such as Picasso, Courbet, Caravaggio and Van Gogh.
The development of Western Art is therefore referenced, reverberating
with past histories, times and cultures to fuse memory, space and place.
The site-specificity of this piece exists in dialogue with thirteen
wall-based works which were exhibited as part of an installation at the
Kunstmuseum Magdeburg, 2012, and comprise iron plates wrapped in the
contrastingly soft and warm material of black coats, which are
haphazardly stitched together using white string.