Jannis kounellis biography of barack

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Biography

1936-2017. Jannis Kounellis (Piraeus, 1936) is a Greek painter and sculptor, a leading exponent of what the critic Germano Celant called "arte povera".

Twenty years old, he left Greece and moved to Rome to study at the Academy of Fine Arts under the guidance of Toti Scialoja to whom he owes the influence of abstract expressionism that together with informal art constitutes the fundamental combination from which his creative path takes its starting point.

In 1960 he made his debut in Rome, setting up his first solo exhibition at the "La Tartaruga" gallery.

Compared to his masters, Kounellis immediately shows a very strong communication urgency that leads him to the rejection of individualistic, aesthetic and decadent perspectives and to the exaltation of the public, collective value of artistic language.

In his early works, in fact, he painted typographic marks on a clear background that allude to the invention of a new o