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' (J. Kounellis, quoted in L'Élémentaire, le vital, l'énergie: Arte Povera in Castello, exh. cat., Venice, 2004, p. 57).

An important Arte Povera style work by Jannis Kounellis, Untitled was executed during an exciting and experimental period in the artist's career - the same year as his ground-breaking show at Galleria L'Attico, Rome where the artist brought twelve live horses into the gallery space and his Il Viaggio exhibition at Galleria Lucio Amelio, Naples, where the present work was exhibited. A small egg resting on a metal shelf protruding from a patinated cast-iron panel, Untitled interestingly questions and challenges the parameters of painting's taxonomy. Unlike Piero della Francesca's famous suspended egg that appears in Madonna Con Santi, the egg in Untitled is not to be pondered allegorically or to be endlessly interpreted in the manner of Renaissance art historians. Instead, the viewer is invited to inspect the egg's sheer materiality and presence in space as defined visually by light and its resultant shadows. Untitled is a spiritual exercise in the contemplative nature of form, a serene experience that is not purely for form's sake.