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Lot Essay
‘The work of a painter is to free something without imposing it’ (J. Kounellis, quoted in interview with C. Lonzi, in Marcartré, 1966, p. 134).
Before Jannis Kounellis presented live horse in lieu of more traditional artworks at the opening exhibition in Rome’s Attica Gallery in 1969, he brought elements from the street into his paintings. He had moved to Rome from his native Greece in 1956 to study art at the Accademia di Belle Arti. There he began makings paintings, such as Untitled that took the symbolic language of road signs, house addresses, and storefronts as their imagery. Painted in stark black on creamy white, Untitled juxtaposes two rows of arrows pointing in opposite directions with a checkerboard pattern.
As renowned art historian and critic Thomas McEvilley wrote, “His paintings ...show several strategies for breaking out a hermetic chamber of pure form and establishing contact with the real world roundabout. The exclusion of images of natural forms in favor of letters, numbers, and signs—such as arrows or arithmetical symbols—brought the work partly out of the range of the image, whether abstract or surrealistic, and into an interface between plastic forms and conceptual discourse” (T. McEvilley, “Mute Prophecies: The Art of Jannis Kounellis in M.J. Jacobs (ed.) Kounellis, exh. cat., Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 1987, p. 25). Italian curator Mario Codognato elaborates on these aspects, while acknowledging the importance of the urban landscape in the paintings, when he wrote Kounellis’s “unconventional and not strictly semantic use of the basic elements of written communication, such as letters, numbers, and arrows” are “almost an acronym of urbanism and its social state, [they] take on a deliberately objective quality, in a controlled and essential pictorial compilation that is without any existential, stylistic, or critically didactic value. Their distinctive literal meaning is diluted in a polarization of every individual letter as a metaphor for language, with their infinite and potential combination” (M. Codognato, “The Roots of the Route,” in Kounellis, exh. cat., Museo D’Arte Contemporanea, Naples, 2006, p. 31).
Jasper Johns’s was also famously using letters, numbers and other symbols, such his Targets and Flags, in his paintings at this time. Like his Italian counterpart, Piero Manzoni, Kounellis sometimes used a stencil to apply paint to canvas, eliminating the traces of his hand from the process. In some ways, Untitled mirrors the global development of Pop in the way it appropriates the landscape of consumer signs for its content. At the same time that artists were responding to the influx of mass-mediated, commercial advertising, philosophers like Roland Barthes and Marshall McLuhan were deconstructing the language of signs, symbols and mass-produced codes. Kournellis’s Untitled captures the spirit of the time, with its deep investments in radically reconfiguring the content of paintings and connecting the space of painting to the world around it, forging a direction that uniquely his own.
Before Jannis Kounellis presented live horse in lieu of more traditional artworks at the opening exhibition in Rome’s Attica Gallery in 1969, he brought elements from the street into his paintings. He had moved to Rome from his native Greece in 1956 to study art at the Accademia di Belle Arti. There he began makings paintings, such as Untitled that took the symbolic language of road signs, house addresses, and storefronts as their imagery. Painted in stark black on creamy white, Untitled juxtaposes two rows of arrows pointing in opposite directions with a checkerboard pattern.
As renowned art historian and critic Thomas McEvilley wrote, “His paintings ...show several strategies for breaking out a hermetic chamber of pure form and establishing contact with the real world roundabout. The exclusion of images of natural forms in favor of letters, numbers, and signs—such as arrows or arithmetical symbols—brought the work partly out of the range of the image, whether abstract or surrealistic, and into an interface between plastic forms and conceptual discourse” (T. McEvilley, “Mute Prophecies: The Art of Jannis Kounellis in M.J. Jacobs (ed.) Kounellis, exh. cat., Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 1987, p. 25). Italian curator Mario Codognato elaborates on these aspects, while acknowledging the importance of the urban landscape in the paintings, when he wrote Kounellis’s “unconventional and not strictly semantic use of the basic elements of written communication, such as letters, numbers, and arrows” are “almost an acronym of urbanism and its social state, [they] take on a deliberately objective quality, in a controlled and essential pictorial compilation that is without any existential, stylistic, or critically didactic value. Their distinctive literal meaning is diluted in a polarization of every individual letter as a metaphor for language, with their infinite and potential combination” (M. Codognato, “The Roots of the Route,” in Kounellis, exh. cat., Museo D’Arte Contemporanea, Naples, 2006, p. 31).
Jasper Johns’s was also famously using letters, numbers and other symbols, such his Targets and Flags, in his paintings at this time. Like his Italian counterpart, Piero Manzoni, Kounellis sometimes used a stencil to apply paint to canvas, eliminating the traces of his hand from the process. In some ways, Untitled mirrors the global development of Pop in the way it appropriates the landscape of consumer signs for its content. At the same time that artists were responding to the influx of mass-mediated, commercial advertising, philosophers like Roland Barthes and Marshall McLuhan were deconstructing the language of signs, symbols and mass-produced codes. Kournellis’s Untitled captures the spirit of the time, with its deep investments in radically reconfiguring the content of paintings and connecting the space of painting to the world around it, forging a direction that uniquely his own.