Jannis Kounellis: Io sono un pittore

The Collezione Giancarlo e Danna Olgiati presents Jannis Kounellis: Io sono un pittore. Curated by Vincenzo de Bellis, the exhibition project takes painting, for the first time, as the principal interpretative lens through which to consider the work of Jannis Kounellis (Piraeus, 1936–Rome, 2017). It thus proposes an alternative critical perspective—broader and more radical—than the simple reception of the artist as one of the leading figures of Arte Povera, or as a master of installation and poet of matter, as he has often been celebrated.

The starting point and guiding thread of the exhibition is a simple phrase, often repeated by Kounellis: “I am a painter,” not the assertion of a technique or a format, but the declaration of an attitude towards reality. “The Greek term zográfos—painter: one who “writes life”—has guided the entire curatorial project. Kounellis painted on canvas in the conventional sense for only a few years of his artistic trajectory, but then, throughout his life, he painted with iron, with coal, with fire, with jute sacks and the scent of coffee. He painted with space, with silence, with the memory of a Mediterranean civilisation that he felt was under threat. Yet to date, no exhibition has used painting as a lens through which to explore his work,” explains Vincenzo de Bellis, curator of the exhibition.

The display in the spaces of the Collezione Olgiati brings together a body of more than 35 works by Jannis Kounellis, from the late 1950s to 2016, including previously unseen pieces. The narrative does not follow a chronological order, but unfolds as a constellation of returns and continuities between matter and weight, language and sign, memory and silence, stage and icon. Through a series of thematic sections spanning the full arc of the artist’s career, the exhibition reveals how Kounellis’s obsessions were never confined to a single stylistic period, but continued to resonate, to transform, and to question us.