About the exhibition
Galleria Continua presented a solo show by one of the leading exponents of Italian post-war art, Jannis Kounellis, who has been a prominent figure on the international art scene for around thirty-five years, working across five continents and in some of the most prestigious art collections and museums in the world. The work of Kounellis was distinguished from the outset by the search for a new spatiality. He identified a hundredweight of coal heaped on the floor of his studio as an element for a different conception of artistic practice. The use of materials considered to be non-pictorial, directly and from real life, introduced him to forms, colours and distinctive smells of natural primary or technological elements, to be transformed into poetic energies through mechanisms of the imagination, of myth, of culture, of classical and religious ideals, of passions.