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Jannis Kounellis was a painter and sculptor belonging to the Arte Povera movement. He is the most internationally known artist of the movement, the one who has exhibited several times in galleries in Italy and abroad. Jannis Kounellis was born in Greece in 1936. After being rejected by the Academy of Art in Athens, at the age of twenty he moved to Rome, where he attended the Academy of Fine Arts. During his studies he came into contact with the expressionist art of Toti Scialoja, by which he is strongly influenced. In 1960 he exhibited his paintings for the first time at the La Tartaruga gallery in Rome. His first paintings are canvases painted with letters and numbers, as well as flowers and stylized natural elements. Starting in 1967 he came into contact with the Arte Povera movement and began to create works with natural materials and with clear references to his Greek origins. In the same year he participated in the collective exhibition Fire, image, water and earth, which marked a change in the art of the time: for the first time natural elements became part of a work of art. During the exhibition Jannis Kounellis presents Margherita di Fuoco, an iron daisy that emits fire from the central part through a cylinder. Kounellis with the flower creates a link between ancient elements such as fire and the modernity represented by the cylinder. In his works Jannis Kounellis uses arte povera materials such as stones, empty or grain bags, iron, lamps, but also live people and animals. The work by Kounellis Cavalli from 1969 is famous, in which twelve horses are tied to the walls in the L'Attico gallery in Rome, symbol of an ideal clash between nature and culture, as is the work in which Kounellis exhibits a live parrot with the perch resting on a metal plate. The artist's arte povera works surround the viewer, who becomes the protagonist of the work itself. Starting from the Seventies, the progressive end of Arte Povera created a sense of controversy and disenchantment in the artist. For Kounellis, poor art has lost its innovative potential and he expresses it through the work Closed door with stones and with the use of elements such as soot and bags of coal. Between 1972 and 1973 Kounellis began to exhibit at the Venice Biennale and the Rome Quadrennial. At the end of the Seventies he began his work on stuffed animals as a symbol of disenchantment and the end of the artist's imagination. Works worth remembering from this period are the stuffed birds pierced by arrows, against a background of an urban landscape, from 1979 and the work from 1989 in which Kounellis hangs parts of a slaughtered ox on plates which are illuminated by oil lamps. Kounellis' work on monumental sculptures began in the 1990s, such as the work Offertorio from 1995 in Piazza del Plebiscito in Naples and the iron mill also in Naples from 1998. Other works worth mentioning are the 1995 monument at the university of Padua for the celebrations of the 50th anniversary of the Resistance and the 2001 work in which the artist nails shoes onto the tracks of the Naples subway. In 2001 Kounellis created lip-shaped jewels in collaboration with Elisabetta Cipriani, which recall one of his gold works from 1972, which was later stolen. In 2002 he revived the work Cavalli in London and in Rome he revived his works of poor art. In the following years he continued his production of monumental works and in 2017 the artist passed away at the age of 80.
