Untitled (sails)

Jannis Kounellis is one of the most challenging artists to have emerged in the 1960s. He moved to Rome from Greece in the late 1950s and became one of the protagonists of arte povera; developing an art of installation using poor materials and alluding to the symbols, weight and practice of labour and its poetic universe of revolutionary associations. Among his earliest iconic works is Senza titolo (Carboniera) [Untitled (Coal container)] (1967) – a square iron container on the floor filled with a pile of coal, reminiscent of the history of the monochrome and in particular of Kasimir Malevich’s Black Square of the early twentieth century.

For the 16th Biennale of Sydney (2008), he has imagined a giant hall in the Industrial Precinct on Cockatoo Island as a space filled with air. Inverting inside and outside, the harbour and the shipyard, Kounellis stages a temporary installation: a forest of sails hanging from the ceiling. For Kounellis, the artist is a person who ‘frees things without imposing anything’.