FLORENCE, ITALY – Jannis Kounellis, a major figure of the Poor Art movement, died in Rome on Thursday at age 80.
Painter and sculptor, Kounellis born in the Greek port city of Piraeus in 1936, Kounellis came to Rome to study at the Academy of Fine Arts and began to build his career there.
From the years of 1960–1966, Kounellis went through a period of only exhibiting paintings. In some of his first exhibitions, Kounellis began stenciling numbers, letters, and words onto his canvases often reflecting advertisements and signs seen on the street. In 1960 he began to introduce found sculptural objects such as actual street signs into his work, exhibiting at Galleria La Tartaruga.
In 1967, Kounellis became associated with Arte Povera, a movement theorized by curator Germano Celant as a major shift from work on flat surfaces to installations.
Deeply disappointed in the 1970s by the failure of the innovative potential of Arte Povera and swallowed up despite himself by commercial dynamics, in the following decades Kounellis was made to rediscover his initial leanings towards monumental emphasis.
In 2004, he celebrated the 500th anniversary of Michelangelo’s creation of David with an installation at Florence’s Galleria dell’Accademia. On 16 February 2017, Kounellis died at the Villa Mafalda hospital in Rome.
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