A tribute to an artist who radically changed the relationship between works and the beholder.
The project focuses on Jannis Kounellis’ research and its profound connection with theatre and performative actions.
At the centre of galleria 5, the work Senza titolo (Notte), echoing his early experiments with the alphabet made in the 1950s, tells of the artist’s distancing himself from any hierarchy of vision. Like limbs of a moving body, the letters oscillate in space, asking to be deciphered and simultaneously observed as pure signs.
The work Senza titolo (Nabucco) makes Va pensiero aria’s notes echo, in a slowed-down and dreamlike way, in the gallery, which thus remains poised between the stage and the exhibition space.
At the end of the itinerary, a rearrangement of the work conceived by the artist for the cloister of San Lazzaro degli Armeni in Venice – in the header – plays on the tension between the materials: like a theatrical backdrop, it remains suspended to indicate a passage and a tension between the inside and the outside of the museum.
In collaboration with Archivio Kounellis and Estate of Jannis Kounellis.
in testata: Jannis Kounellis, Senza titolo, 2003 – iron, glass. Private Collection, Roma. Photo Vincenzo Labellarte, courtesy Fondazione MAXXI © Estate of Jannis Kounellis, by SIAE 2023
A tribute to an artist who radically changed the relationship between works and the beholder.
The project focuses on Jannis Kounellis’ research and its profound connection with theatre and performative actions.
At the centre of galleria 5, the work Senza titolo (Notte), echoing his early experiments with the alphabet made in the 1950s, tells of the artist’s distancing himself from any hierarchy of vision. Like limbs of a moving body, the letters oscillate in space, asking to be deciphered and simultaneously observed as pure signs.
The work Senza titolo (Nabucco) makes Va pensiero aria’s notes echo, in a slowed-down and dreamlike way, in the gallery, which thus remains poised between the stage and the exhibition space.
At the end of the itinerary, a rearrangement of the work conceived by the artist for the cloister of San Lazzaro degli Armeni in Venice – in the header – plays on the tension between the materials: like a theatrical backdrop, it remains suspended to indicate a passage and a tension between the inside and the outside of the museum.
In collaboration with Archivio Kounellis and Estate of Jannis Kounellis.
in testata: Jannis Kounellis, Senza titolo, 2003 – iron, glass. Private Collection, Roma. Photo Vincenzo Labellarte, courtesy Fondazione MAXXI © Estate of Jannis Kounellis, by SIAE 2023