A journey by way of the Mediterranean by way of ‘arte povera’ by Jannis Kounellis | Culture | EUROtoday

In 1969, the Greek artist Jannis Kounellis (Piraeus, 1936) positioned 12 Percheron horses within the L’Attico gallery in Rome. It was a shock For the context of the artwork world itself, 12 draft horses have been present in an exhibition house the place every thing was noble and dominated by sculpture, chilly and motionless. Kounellis, who died in Rome in 2017, then needed to assert, with a revolutionary creative expression, an method of artwork to life and introduce a fraction of transferring items reminiscent of horses to distort the considerable equestrian sculptures that had been created all through the historical past of artwork. It was an specific instance of how the creator himself outlined himself: as an historic man and a contemporary painter.

The biggest exponent of poor artworkan Italian creative motion that emerged within the late Sixties and characterised by means of poor or pure supplies, has been starring within the exhibition since this Wednesday on the Es Baluard modern artwork museum in Palma. Labyrinth with out partitions, which compiles for the primary time the Greek artist’s relationship with the Mediterranean Sea by way of works created all through totally different phases of his life.

The foremost set up, offered on the 1993 Venice Biennale, is made up of a set of 9 huge Venetian sails organized within the form of a fan, worn, colourful and adorned, spanning from the seventeenth century to the current day and complemented by different items executed by way of fragments of a ship discovered on the Italian coast, Mallorcan sails twisted to mark the folds on metal frames or an enormous tapestry with greater than a thousand shells. marine collected from a seashore close to Rome. The title of the exhibition performs with the idea of the immensity of the ocean, with out partitions, and the distribution of the candles within the room, organized like a small labyrinth that goals to mirror the creator’s internal journey by way of his seek for the misplaced middle that he at all times claimed.

For Kounellis’ associate, Michelle Coudray, the artist’s relationship with the ocean got here instantly from his birthplace, Piraeus (Greece), the primary port of Athens and one of many gateways to the Aegean. However, Coudray clarifies, Kounellis was not a person tempted by navigation or life at sea. “I was imbued with the atmosphere of the docks and the desire to travel, to meet people, other cultures. I was a traveler.” The works on show goal to inform their story by way of an excavation in reminiscence and a important rereading of the previous, though for the curator of the exhibition, David Barro, the artist’s language “is radically contemporary.” And these items by Kounellis concentrate on the criticism he made concerning the transformation of maritime commerce, which opened the door to the start of globalization. “His work is critical, committed to his time. He came to the conclusion that post-war European society lacked the appropriate aesthetic forms to reflect the fragmentation that contemporary life was beginning to have. We are talking about the sixties, but it is a discourse that we could be making today,” says the curator, who additionally talks concerning the references that his work launches in direction of different authors reminiscent of Caravaggio, Pollock or Klint, and that the Greek labored in a pure “but conscious” manner.

Kounellis at all times labored with supplies that he himself chosen, generally with fragments of forgotten objects or with the weather of nature themselves. In the exhibition, a number of items of a ship are displayed hanging as in the event that they have been elements of an animal that has been by way of the slaughterhouse, fragments that belong to a ship that he discovered on the coast close to Rome and that, in reality, he ordered to be minimize “as if it were an animal.” Damiano Urbani, who labored because the artist’s assistant for greater than 30 years, explains that the Greek at all times had the concept in his head after which got down to discover what he wanted to execute it. “He decided everything, from the millimetric arrangement of the pieces, to how the ropes or stones were placed.” On one event he accompanied him to a seashore close to Rome to gather the greater than 1,000 shells that now kind a part of one of many central items of the exhibition, a form of tapestry wherein every of the thousand specimens are sewn like strains of writing on a clean web page.

Kounellis typically landed on the venue the place he needed to carry out empty-handed. “He arrived, he started to think about many things, such as the architecture of the place where he had to exhibit or its culture, always looking at the details. With two or three simple things he built the exhibition,” remembers his colleague. Highly influenced by a non-practicing orthodox training, Coudray reaffirms that the artist at all times noticed the hazards of globalization that lots of the works now on show in Palma denounce, as a result of his technology was surpassed by it. “He was an internationalist, but he didn’t believe in globalization. Now he wouldn’t be happy at all.” The exhibition Labyrinth with out partitions It might be seen on the Es Baluard Museum till August 30 after which it can journey to the Galician Center for Contemporary Art, which co-produces the exhibition.