Untitled

Jannis Kounellis often included clothing, such as hats, coats and shoes in his work, which often seems to evoke ghostly presences.

In this untitled work, a pair of worn shoes—lived-in objects—speak to the human condition. The artist often wore shoes until their soles were worn out. Shoes refer to endless wandering, a recurring metaphor in culture and literature. The layers of lead footprints under the soles allude to the path Kounellis forged and to memories imprinted during his life. The weight of the lead symbolizes the heavy burden of the human condition. The use of bourgeois clothing references the literary image of the 19th-century middle-class man whose crisis represents the modern social and political tragedy, as in Bertolt Brecht’s plays.