Untitled

'In the 1960s, I was designated as an 'artist' because no-one knew how to define a heap of coal. But I'm a painter, and I lay claim to my initiation in painting because painting is the construction of images, it doesn't indicate a manner, even less a technique. Each painter has his own way of seeing and methods of constructing an image, and the common approach which consists of associating traditional art with the word 'painter' and an anarchistic, modern and experimental role with the word 'artist' is ridiculous. Jackson Pollock was a painter who reinvented the American space with morality. Mexican murales are paintings, Duchamp himself was a painter. Liberalism has given painting freedom as far as the imagination can go, and has re-endowed the artist with a fully intellectual role' (Jannis Kounellis, quoted in L'Élémentaire, le vital, l'énergie: Arte Povera in Castello, exh. cat., Venice, 2004, p. 57).

With its progressive sequence of four vertical burlap bags pinned with a series of three biomorphic wax shapes onto a single lead support, Untitled executed in 1986 is a painting that elegantly uses its materials to expand itself from a flat surface into the physical space of the viewer. Kounellis balances monumental design, opposition between strength and lyricism, hardness and softness, and earthy materials to describe the poetry of the everyday. Using sequential progression and repetition with different forms and materials on a flat surface Kounellis creates the foundations of his oeuvre: memory and repetition. Untitled, though formally structured in a traditional painting arrangement, has a profoundly mysterious sense of form and space.