Jannis Kounellis

Jannis Kounellis, whose contribution to the international art movement of Arte Povera has been defining, left Greece very young to leave behind the trauma of the civil war. In 2012 he creates a work amidst the economic and social crisis that Greece was going through at the time. Kounellis’s installation could only be a response to this turmoil, as he put it, “at this particular moment it would be impossible to have just an exhibition of art in Greece”.

For the exhibition at the Museum of Cycladic Art, Kounellis created new works specifically for the Stathatos Mansion, “this bourgeois house” as he used to refer to it. He used materials found in the local Athenian markets and junkyards, objects which carry the history of the place, of a city that has been through endless changes of populations, ideologies, and levels of prosperity and –especially in the last years– some very extreme changes.

The same objects carry personal memories and they can be symbols of desires and hope but also of failed dreams and aspirations. In Kounellis’s work the personal history and the history of the place, the city, are equally important. The black overcoats that appear repeatedly in his work, can represent the artist, the viewer, but also the “little guy”, Chaplin’s tramp of our times, who gets trampled over while societies change. The works might reflect current problems but as always in Kounellis’s works, even though the objects have their own history, they are incorporated in his installations in such a way that in the end they become universal, ancient and modern.