Jannis Kounellis - Artist Info

About Jannis Kounellis

Name variants

Kounellis Jannis
  • Biography

    "Jannis Kounellis, Leader in 60's 'Poor Art' Movement, Dies at 80 by William Grimes, February 21, 2017. The New York Times, Art & Design section.

    Jannis Kounellis, a Greek-born Italian artist who made use of humble materials like burlap sacks, wax and coal in works of sculpture and installations* that offered a poetic counterstatement to the values of high art and the corporate world, died on Feb. 16 in Rome. He was 80.

    The cause was heart failure, family members said.

    Mr. Kounellis emerged in the late 1960s as a leader of Arte Povera* (“Poor Art”), a mostly Italian movement that, responding to the political turbulence of the time, embraced a defiantly anticapitalist, anti-hierarchical philosophy of art makin...

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