Jannis Kounellis (b.1936 Piraeus, Greece d.2017 Rome, Italy) was a seminal figure of postwar European art and a central protagonist of Arte Povera. Born in Greece, he moved to Rome in 1956 to study at the Accademia di Belle Arti, where he lived and worked for the remainder of his life. Emerging in the late 1950s and 1960s, his practice developed in opposition to the growing technocracy and consumerism of the period, asserting a renewed engagement with material presence, history, and human labor.
Kounellis created installations and sculptures using elemental materials drawn from nature and industry, including iron, coal, lead, wood, stone, rope, earth, and fire. These materials—often evoking the atmosphere of ports, workshops, and sites of labor—were chosen not for refinement but for their physical weight, historical resonance, and symbolic charge.
Closely aligned with fellow artists such as Joseph Beuys, Kounellis’s work played a decisive role in redefining sculpture and installation as experiential and spatial practices. His work received early and sustained recognition in Germany and internationally. Kounellis held his first solo exhibition with Konrad Fischer Galerie in 1980.
Kounellis exhibited extensively worldwide from the early 1960s onward. His work has been presented at major international exhibitions including the Venice Biennale, documenta in Kassel, and the Triennale di Milano. Works by Kounellis are held in prominent public collections, among them the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Hamburger Bahnhof and Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf; S.M.A.K., Ghent; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney.
Major solo exhibitions and retrospectives have been presented at institutions including Museo Jumex, Mexico City, and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2022–23); MAXXI, Rome (2023); Tate Modern, London; Museo Novecento, Florence; Fondazione Prada, Venice; Monnaie de Paris; Museo Espacio; Musée d’Art Moderne, Saint-Étienne; Parasol Unit, London; Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens; Today Art Museum, Beijing; and Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin.