Student at the Academy of Fine Arts, Kounellis, native of the Piraeus, transfers himself to Rome, at the end of 1956, where he concludes his studies.

The teachers Burri and Fontana have been recognized, as much as Pollock, for the action of breaking the boundaries of representative space that has been achieved by them, so opposing himself to the Informal climate, Kounellis sets up his alphabet made of figures, letters and signals printed with black enamel on sheets that were hung on walls, and that he presented at his first personal exhibition at “La Tartaruga” gallery, in 1960. At issue was the research of a new spatiality, that the artist discovers in a hundred kilograms of carbon piled up in a corner of his studio. From then on, the work of art of Kounellis will live in the relationship between two opposite principles, that of structure and that of sensibility. The insertion, in the work of art of objects coming from the world, a trait of profound harmony with poverist poetics, articulates itself inside him according to the two constitutive principles and arrives to the withdrawal from living nature (the famous horses of the L’Attico Gallery, from 1969, but also birds in various occasions).

The dialectic tensions that come to action in a work by Kounellis are constitutive of a space that is artistic and mental. And it is this intention to the world that, in the Seventies will take the traits of history, of historical memory: without ever accessing to narration, the work of the artist will be an always more direct intervention in historical debate and in the mental formation of the concept of history.  

Fire will oppose to all of this, as it is a symbol of vitality and of the eternity of change: a contraposition like the one between myth and history. The work of Kounellis was immediately recognised  from the art world, and the art exhibitions, set-up by this untiring worker of the entire world, are countless. At the same time his work has been transformed into a fundamental subject of study by critics and scholars of contemporary.

In Italy the last big exposition of Kounellis’ works was held at the Pecci Museum of Prato, with the organization of Bruno Corà, in the summer of 2001, accompanied by another of his numerous and ponderous catalogues. Last exhibition in Italy: Jannis Kounellis, curated by Bruno Corà, Foundation Arnaldo Pomodoro, Milan, September 2006. Recent referring publication: Kounellis, this of Bruno Corà, Edizioni “Il Ponte” Florence, 2007.

Everywhere Kounellis affirms an only will: the artist is a constructor of signs, that disposes in the image, according to a conscience of radical responsibility, subversive and civil, according to an ideology that testimonies an identity, in possession of a language, able to give a name to a story. His is a pilgrimage through shapes, colours, smells, through the primary elements of nature and of matter, that is to be transformed into poetic energies, through mechanisms of the imaginary, of myths, of cultures, of classical and religious ideals, of passions; the itinerary of pilgrimage is an individual route that identifies itself into popular epics, it is a singular and coral odyssey.

Kounellis gives shape to all of this with the early humanistic tension, and as an enlightened that welcomes, in his own dialectic, the supreme divine idea. For this reason, it seems to me that for a “coal bunker” born as a plastic form into empty space and positioned on the pavement since its origin, it is possible, in the exhibition of Naples in 1984, to position itself in a new spatiality, to rotate and praise itself  in a new shape made with wax on a metallic net, to turn upside-down in a different perspective on the vertical surface of a bronzed metal plate facing the wall, in other words formalize itself and condensate itself into a sign for a process of becoming a symbolic representation of its own; it is for this reason that the great wall piece exposed in Naples, entirely realized on an iron support, where the passages that Kounellis’ linguistic research made during the years between  1982 and 1984 figure almost like in a synthesis, communicates a solidity and a tension proper of the works in which an artist revels the consciousness of having reached some results that coincide with a story that Kounellis doesn’t betray, instead he doesn’t hesitate to reaffirm it.