Jannis Kounellis

Greek-born artist Jannis Kounellis is often identified with the Italian Arte Povera movement, though he had already made a name for himself in the Roman art scene of the early 1960s before allying himself to that movement in 1967. Using materials then considered unusual (such as wool, coal, live animals and plants), and blessed with a keen sixth sense for combining them, Kounellis worked to eliminate ideological boundaries between life and art, ethics and aesthetics, creation and production, the social and the individual. In the 1970s and 1980s, Kounellis continued to build this vocabulary of materials, introducing smoke, shelving units, coffee and coal. Kounellis's exemplary artistic odyssey and his more than four decades of fervent and impassioned activity are here surveyed on the occasion of his first large-scale exhibition in Belgium.