Jannis Kounellis

Sprovieri Gallery, London

Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 2010

Naples, Museo di Capodimonte, The Go Between. A Selection of International Emerging Artists from the Ernesto Esposito Collection, 2014-15, p. 133, illustrated

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the sheet is slightly lighter in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. The sheet is laid down and the edges of the sheet are uneven and slightly discoloured. There are artist's pinholes in all four corners and to the centre of the vertical edges. There are some scattered shallow handling creases in places, notably to the lower half of the sheet and some light undulation in the lower centre beneath the collage element. Close inspection reveals specks of foxing in places, notably to the upper centre of the left edge, towards the centre of the right edge and to the left of the central D as visible in the catalogue illustration. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultra-violet light.
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Executed in 1959-60, Untitled is an early work from a formative moment in Janis Kounellis’ career. Having moved to Rome from his native Greece in 1956, Kounellis developed his nascent practice amidst the rise of a new artistic era in post-war Italy. Towards the end of the 1950s, figures such as Alberto Burri, Lucio Fontana and Piero Manzoni had blazed a trail for a radical form of abstraction that, removed from the gestural expressionism of Arte Informel, heralded the primacy of the picture-object. Inheritor to these revolutionary ideals, which no less inspired an entire generation of artists in Italy, Kounellis developed a reactionary and deeply conceptual practice that connected the hermetic realm of pure form with the real world. Although famous for his avant-garde installations, it was nonetheless through the traditional mode of painting that Kounellis developed the core of his rigorously conceptual oeuvre. Demonstrative of Kounellis’ key scrutiny of quotidian sign and symbol, the present work is an early palimpsest of the artist’s radical aim to create an interface between plastic form and conceptual discourse.

Presenting a field of letters, cardinal numbers and typographical symbols across a blank surface, Untitled is paradigmatic of Kounellis’ early pictorial experimentations. In an effort to challenge the expressivity of Art Informel and the monochromicity of his forebears, Kounellis exchanged the otherworldly ecstasy of abstract form for the austere stringency of language and symbol. Although these early two-dimensional works relate to the letter and number paintings of Jasper Johns, Kounellis’ appropriation of sign and symbol should be viewed as a rigorous semantic dialogue in contrast to Johns, whose paintings fundamentally pivot upon the tradition of Abstract Expressionism. In an effort to remove evidence of authorial gesture, Kounellis’ early paintings employ stencilled lettering and numbers, similar to those experienced in every-day life. Herein, Kounellis invited the aesthetic and referential world of the quotidian into his work.  As outlined by art historian Thomas McEvilley, “in 1960 he incorporated an actual street sign – a found sculptural element – into a painting. In the same year he donned one of his letter paintings as a garment (based on Hugo Ball’s famous costume from the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916) and performed an action in his studio as, in effect, a part of one of his own paintings. Painting, sculpture, and performance were mingling to show a way out of the traditional aesthetic vocabulary… In general a trajectory away from painting was inherent in the development of the paintings themselves” (Thomas McEvilley, ‘Mute Prophecies: The Art of Jannis Kounellis’ in: Exhibition Catalogue, Chicago. Museum of Contemporary Art, Jannis Kounellis, 1986-87, p. 25). With many of these early sematic paintings in museum collections worldwide, the present work stands testament to an important epiphany and point of evolution in Kounellis’ practice.

Following the Second World War, the fragmentation of society invoked the need for a congruent form of artistic expression. Kounellis was very sensitive to this socio-political context, and his early paintings gave utterance to this jumbled symbolic stuttering. In the present work a schema of outlined and half-filled letters, numbers and arrows deliver a syncopated garble of DADA-esque nonsense that is evocative and seemingly recognisable, yet entirely haphazard. Iconoclastically severed from the traditional practice of painting owing to the trauma of War and the very real prospect of apocalypse, Kounellis took on a contemporary art practice that beginning with his fragmented numbers and letters, repudiated style in favour of a multi-disciplinary and protean approach to art-making. Stuttering to communicate, the paintings represent Kounellis’ foremost endeavour to regenerate and rearticulate artistic expression. Radiating out from the two-dimensional support of the present work, Kounellis went on to challenge the very philosophical parameters of creative practice and invited the real into the realm of art.