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Lot 25AR
Jannis Kounellis(Greek, 1936-2017)Segnali
1963
1963
Withdrawn
Amended
27 June 2018, 17:00 BST
London, New Bond Street£50,000 - £70,000
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Jannis Kounellis (Greek, 1936-2017)
Segnali
1963
signed
industrial paint on card
71.6 by 101.8 cm.
28 3/16 by 40 1/16 in.
This work was executed in 1963.
1963
signed
industrial paint on card
71.6 by 101.8 cm.
28 3/16 by 40 1/16 in.
This work was executed in 1963.
Footnotes
This work is accompanied by a photo-certificate of authenticity signed by the artist.
Provenance
Galleria La Bertesca, Genoa
Lucio Amelio Collection, Naples
Studio Deambrogi, Milan
Galleria Notizie, Turin
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner circa 1975
Jannis Kounellis' Alfabeto paintings were first created in 1958 whilst the Greek artist was studying at Rome's prestigious Accademia di Belle Arti. That these initial works developed so quickly and confidently into one of Kounellis' most iconic and celebrated series, is a remarkable testimony to his originality and flair.
Characterised by their monochromatic palette, his seemingly random arrangements of stencilled letters, numbers and symbols were lifted from that most ubiquitous of objects, the street sign. Once-familiar road traffic markings were isolated, dismantled and selectively redeployed, forming a new visual language that was recognisably the artist's own.
Often executed in varying states of overlap, repetition and inversion, these black stencils are playfully enigmatic and convey a sense of movement that was entirely absent from their original context as road safety devices. The present work Segnali, translating as signals, witnesses his iconic inverted '3' motifs jostling with each other for space as they fill the composition, the accompanying dashes and arrows emphasizing movement as they start to disappear beyond the work's margins. Although familiar symbols, they ultimately resist meaning once isolated from their original context, and in the process, are infused with an aura of mystery that lifts them beyond the sum of their component parts.
The Alfabeto series spans a number of important art historical movements, both referencing prevailing styles and tirelessly anticipating those to come. Whilst the works are abstract in nature, the source material is Pop, and the enigmatic nature of symbols hints at Conceptualism. Although they owe a debt to the black and white colour palette of Franz Kline and Jasper John's celebrated Numbers series, their execution is more controlled and less gestural than the work of Kounellis' American contemporaries. The artist is more interested in the impersonal mechanics of their reproduction than the dynamics of spontaneous mark making.
In his continued quest for experimentation the artist incorporated found objects in his works, including actual street signs whose text he had deconstructed for the earliest Alfabeto paintings. These works were the forerunners of those produced from 1967 when Kounellis became associated with Arte Povera, a movement focused on challenging the very hierarchies of artistic media, deploying everyday materials to both champion the universal life-enhancing poetry of contemporary art and to undermine its commodification. In Kounellis' case this meant using coal, wax, burlap, meat, rags and wool, and in perhaps his most famous and daring work he installed a dozen live horses at Galleria L'Attico, Rome, blowing apart the notion of what could be considered art and winning huge critical acclaim at the same time.
Following his first exhibition of works at Galleria La Tartaruga, Rome in 1960, Kounellis work has been shown widely including at Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, the Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens and the Tate Modern, London. Following the artist's death in 2017, he leaves behind a remarkable legacy of works spanning all the way back to his Alfabeto series. It is impossible to understate how important these early masterpieces were to the artist's creative trajectory and explains why they amongst his most sought after works today.
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