This volume accompanies the exhibitions presented respectively in Florence, at the Museo Novecento from 15 March to 9 June 2024 and in Padua, at the Museo Eremitani from 27 July to 17 November 2024.
Jannis Kounellis’s attitude to drawing varied greatly. As an “academic” means of expression, he rarely used it until the seventies, adopting it occasionally, mostly for designing theatre sets and to make classic sketches of projects to be then embodied in other materials and media. However, 1973 marked a turning point: for the first time, in a group show, Kounellis exhibited a set of works on paper, small-format sheets from which colour was almost totally absent. And the works brought together in this volume also date from the seventies and eighties, being exhibited for the first time at an exhibition curated by Rudi Fuchs entitled “La Stanza Vede” at the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague in 1990. It consists of about 140 sheets in which the theme of space, enunciated by the title, is paradoxically overturned: it is not the viewer who sees and is the protagonist, but the room performs this part. Through allusions to De Chirico, Picasso and even Renaissance perspective, Kounellis would continue over the years to develop the profound fascination of tradition in his renewed vision of the spatial dimension: sometimes traversed by symbolic presences, but above all imagined and dreamed.
Trilingual volume in Italian, English and German. Translations by Fiona Elliott, Cristina Prischich Ruhland, Language Consulting Congressi, Milan.
€ 35,00